elsnet |
Infrastructures for Global Collaboration |
Workshop Announcement and Invitation to Contribute
organized by ELSNET
in conjunction with ACL 2000
Hong Kong, October 7, 2000
At the same time it is clear that solutions found for problems in one language may be fully or partially portable to other languages.
Within the European Union, the above (and other) observations have led to the creation of major R&D programmes such as Language Engineering, and Human Language Technologies, where parties from all over Europe (and even outside) join forces in order to address the common problems. In addition, a number of infrastructures have been set up at the European level, such as ELRA (dealing with creating, sharing and distributing language resources), ELSNET (a network of key players in the European field of human language technologies, aiming at sharing information and expertise), and EAGLES/ISLE (aimed at developing standards in an international context).
The existence of transnational infrastructures is not limited to Europe, as is demonstrated by e.g. the main international professional organisations in the field of language (ACL) and speech (ISCA) technology, and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), but what is lacking is a clear overview of what transnational infrastructures exist world-wide, and how these infrastructures can be optimally exploited for global collaboration.