ELSNET Network Programme 1996-2000

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Contents

 
• Summary
• Long-term technological goals
  • Goal:
  • Rationale:
  • Skills required:
  • State of the art in research:
  • State of the art on the market:
• Background
• Approach
• Actions and Milestones
  • Integration of language and speech
    • Task-1 Building and running the Network:
    • Task-2 Summer schools:
    • Task-3 Integration workshops:
    • Task-4 Books:
    • Task-5 Special sessions:
    • Task-6 Dissemination:
    • Task-7 Keyword search:
    • Task-8 Student journal:
    • Task-9 Information services:
    • Task-10 Curricula:
    • Task-11 Joint projects:
  • Integration and comparative evaluation of research results
    • Task-12 Common representations:
    • Task-13 Evaluation infrastructure:
    • Task-14 Evaluation methods:
  • Communication and collaboration between academia and industry
    • Task-15 Bullet courses:
    • Task-16 Setting up an industrial panel:
    • Task-16a Preparing the Roadmap:
    • Task-17 Research workshops:
    • Task-18 Industry services:
  • Language coverage
    • Task-19 Linguistic resources:
    • Task-20 Other languages:
    • Task-21 Eastern Europe:
• Nodes
• Management and Organization
  • Overview
  • Admission and nomination procedures
    • Coordinating Node:
    • Managing Nodes:
    • Academic Associate Nodes:
    • Industrial Associate Nodes:
  • Executive Board
    • Procedures and meetings:
  • Industrial Panel
  • Extended Executive Board (EEB)
    • Procedures, Meetings:
  • The ELSNET Foundation
  • Finance Committee
  • Task Groups
  • Special Interest Groups
• Role of the Nodes
• Overall Coordination
  • General tasks
  • Infrastructure planning
  • Industrial Links
  • Eastern and Central Europe
• Relationships with other projects or proposals
• About this document ...

Summary

The problem addressed by ELSNET is the construction of multilingual integrated language and speech systems with unrestricted coverage of spoken and written language. This long term technological goal can only be achieved by joint efforts on a European scale, requiring skills covering virtually all subareas of NLP and Speech and their intersections, and a broad language coverage. Multilingual integrated language and speech systems, even in restricted form, are crucial for the creation and the accessibility of the emerging European information infrastructure. Industries will need them when marketing services and products across language barriers. In the form of embedded systems, these integrated systems will serve as enabling technologies. The fact that out of 100 institutions currently constituting ELSNET, some 40 belong to private industry reflects that industry has acknowledged the importance of ELSNET's objectives and the role ELSNET plays in order to achieve them.

ELSNET, as a Network of Excellence, brings together the main European research teams (both academic and industrial, with wide geographical coverage) and an increasing number of SMEs in the field of NLP and Speech. It is in an excellent position to contribute to the common goal by means of research coordination, training and mobility. The size of the network requires an indirect approach to research coordination, based on convergence, integration and complementarity. Activities will focus on four areas: Integration of Language and Speech, Integration and Comparative Evaluation of Research Results, Relationship between Academia and Industry, and Language Coverage.

Many of ELSNET-2's projected activities are continuations of successful actions undertaken under the present ELSNET contract. Joint workshops with participation from academia and industry will contribute to coordination in the area of research. Proposals (to be submitted for funding from other sources) will be prepared in the area of evaluation, aiming at the development of new evaluation methods for integrated systems, and at the creation of a European evaluation infrastructure. The Annual European Summer School plays a key role in training. Common curricula in NLP and Speech will be developed, and facilities will be offered for student placements in industry. ELSNET has been an important European actor in the field of language and speech resources, and will continue its actions in close collaboration with related European actions (e.g. ELRA and EAGLES). The links between academia and industry will be strengthened by means of an intensified dissemination of information in both directions (notably via the World Wide Web), and by the creation of a permanent industrial panel for regular consultation on matters of common interest, such as research directions and training needs.

A new step is the creation of a legal entity which will allow the network to be more visible, and to participate as a partner in joint actions. This will also allow the network as such to (eventually) generate income of its own, and to make its existence less dependent on EC funding.

Finally, ELSNET-2 will, fully in line with the EC's current policy, open up towards the East, with the medium term goal to create one single Network in Language and Speech, covering both Western and Central and Eastern Europe.

Long-term technological goals

Goal:

The long-term technological goal which unites the participants in ELSNET is to build integrated multilingual Speech and NL systems with unrestricted coverage of both spoken and written language. However, the realistic prospects for commercial applications involve systems which are restricted in one way or another. Building such restricted (and for the longer term unrestricted) systems requires a massive joint effort by two pairs of communities: on the one hand the NLP and Speech communities, and on the other academia and industry. Both pairs of communities are traditionally separated by wide gaps, and it is ELSNET's objective to provide a platform which bridges both gaps, and which ensures that all four parties are offered optimal conditions for fruitful cooperation, both in the short term (through collaboration) and in the long term (through training).

Rationale:

Multilingual NL and Speech systems (even in restricted form) are crucially important for Europe:

• They are needed to implement and to ensure access to the emerging information infrastructure on a European scale.
• They will contribute to the increase of European industry's competitiveness by giving better access to product and service markets across language barriers.
• They serve as enabling technologies in the form of embedded systems.

Skills required:

Building integrated multilingual Speech and NL systems, even if they are restricted in coverage or functionality, requires a high degree of interdisciplinarity, especially since it is becoming increasingly clear that integrated NLP and Speech systems cannot be seen in isolation from multimodal systems in general.

Skills in a variety of areas are required for building NLP and Speech systems: speech input and output, phonology and prosody, lexicons and corpora, parsing and generation, semantics and discourse, dialogues and multimodality, multilinguality, human-computer interaction and human factors, reusable tools, software, resources and evaluation methods.

State of the art in research:

Research on Speech and NL is an enterprise whose long term importance is widely recognized to be enormous, both on scientific and technological grounds, and which has seen some striking developments during the last decade. Speech research has benefited from massive investment on a worldwide scale, leading to many outstanding achievements, especially in the development of speech recognition systems. In NL, there has been a productive rapprochement between computational approaches on the one hand, and theoretical frameworks, on the other. More recently the NL community has taken an interest in the adoption of robust methods, based on incorporation of statistical and other numeric methods. At the same time one can observe a tendency, both at the national and the European level, to encourage and fund projects which incorporate both language and speech such as VERBMOBIL (D), MAIS and RAILTEL (MLAP), DIALOGUE (DK), the TST National Programme in NL and Speech (NL), Språkteknologiprogrammet (S), AUPELF-UREF Francophone Coordinated Research Actions, CNRS GDR-PRC CHM and CCIIL programs (F), SALT (UK).

State of the art on the market:

A variety of products have now reached the market. In the area of speech typical examples are systems for speaker identification, speech understanding, speaker independent isolated word recognition, language identification and limited domain dictation, telephone servers, text-to-speech systems and tools for handicapped.

In NL a number of applications are commercially available, e.g.: editing and markup facilities, spelling checkers, hyphenators, on-line dictionaries and thesauri, translation aids, grammar and style checkers, moderate quality (but high speed and volume) machine translation, NL access to information systems.

Combined NL and Speech systems are now on the market in the form of small-vocabulary spoken language dialogue systems. More complex systems of this type are being field tested, and on their way to product development.

Background

ELSNET is an existing Network of Excellence, initiated in 1991 with 25 founding nodes, all academic. Over the last four years its membership has increased to about 100 nodes, 60 academic and 40 industrial, covering nearly all EU member states with the exception of Luxemburg and Finland, as well as six non-member states in Western and Eastern Europe.

One of the achievements in the area of research coordination has been the writing of a report, entitled `Strategic Research in Speech and Natural Language', which presented a long term research strategy, and advocated an approach to research based on evaluation which would have the advantages of schemes like DARPA in the US, without having its disadvantages. It was supported by a number of industrialists. The document was useful for ELSNET as a way of developing consensus and although it is hard to be certain about any causal effects, it was an early contribution to a growing interest in evaluation that can be discerned in various recent and ongoing projects. Under ELSNET-2, we envisage trying to implement, on a very modest scale, some actions to support evaluation driven research.

In the area of training a number of successful actions have been undertaken by ELSNET. The annual European Summer School, devoted each year to a different topic in the area of language and speech, has already become a tradition, with broad participation from academia and industry. The topics covered so far were Prosody (1993), Corpus-based Methods (1994), Multilinguality (1995), and the series will be continued. Training and mobility of researchers has been successfully implemented via participation in the HCM programme.

Information dissemination has developed to a powerful instrument for bringing the two pairs of communities (NLP and Speech, academia and industry) closer together. The electronic mailing list elsnet-list and the bimonthly newsletter ELSNews play an important role. The ELSNET World Wide Web (WWW) pages attract an increasing number of electronic visitors.

Many links between industry and academia have been established. ELSNET's information dissemination structures ensure a continuous flow of information in both directions, but this has not resulted in a continuous dialogue between the two communities. A permanent Industrial Panel will be set up in order to remedy this.

ELSNET has been very successful in the area of language and speech resources, and has, through its spin-off project RELATOR, been instrumental in the creation of ELRA, the European Language Resources Association. CD-ROMs with language resources have been produced by ELSNET, and are being distributed. Although part of this distribution activity may be taken over by ELRA, ELSNET will nevertheless continue to play a prominent role in the definition of models for linguistic resources.

Important initiatives have been taken with respect to Eastern and Central Europe, such as the Survey of Language Engineering Organizations in Eastern and Central Europe, which has attracted much attention, both from academia and from industry, and the Copernicus project ELSNET Goes East, which aims at extending ELSNET towards the East. ELSNET-2 will prepare follow-ups for both activities, with the intention of eventually creating a single Pan-European Network in Language and Speech.

We can conclude that at this moment ELSNET is fully up and running, and playing a significant role on the NLP and Speech scene in Europe. The successful activities will of course be continued, but as the rest of this network programme will show, there is scope for new initiatives.

Approach

Research coordination is at the heart of ELSNET's activities, but it has to be kept in mind that ELSNET's role, as a non-funding body, cannot be to directly coordinate the research carried out by its one hundred or so nodes. Research laboratories have their own research agendas, determined almost entirely by their own objectives and funding conditions, both of which are beyond the control of ELSNET.

Yet ELSNET, as a community including the majority of the most relevant European actors in the field of NL and Speech research, has been and still is in a unique position to contribute to Europe-wide research coordination in an indirect way, by providing an infrastructure for research which is aimed at convergence, integration and complementarity on the one hand, and multilinguality on the other. It should be noted that the multilingual character of the European market puts us in a unique position in comparison with our main competitors USA and Japan, who serve essentially monolingual home markets.

ELSNET will address the following four specific problem areas relating to the common technological goals of both academia and industry:

• Integration of language and speech. There appears to be much more activity involving both language and speech than five years ago. This is clearly reflected by the number of joint NLP and Speech projects over the last couple of years. Contributing factors may have been the use of common methods (data driven techniques), the funding policies of EU and national programmes, and, last but not least the collaborative and support actions initiated by ELSNET. Yet we are still far removed from a situation where it is natural for NL and Speech people to work closely together, or even to be aware of each other's research agendas and achievements. It is symptomatic that academic curricula including both NL and Speech are the exception rather than the rule. ELSNET is currently initiating a number of activities in order to remedy this situation.
• Integration and comparative evaluation of research results in NLP and Speech. Results emerging from basic and applied research are often difficult to combine or compare, even within the NLP and Speech communities. By promoting the use of common representations and interfaces, ELSNET will contribute to the better integration of research output originating from different sources. Facilities for comparative evaluation will help researchers and industrialists in identifying the most promising research directions. ELSNET will take initiatives towards the creation of such facilities.
• The relationship between academia and industry. Industry needs to be kept aware of new developments in research, while researchers should be aware of industrial needs and of novel applications which may have an impact on the academic research agendas. To this end ELSNET will implement and exploit a number of mechanisms for bidirectional communication between academia and industry.
• Language coverage. For both research activities and NLP and Speech products, language coverage is quite uneven, which is a clear disadvantage for some language communities, both in view of their access to the information society and of their opportunities to market their products and services on a European scale. ELSNET will make an effort, throughout the execution of its work programme, to ensure that sufficient attention is paid to the interests of other languages than the main working languages in research and development.

Actions and Milestones

For each of the four problem areas we plan the following actions and milestones, to be reached by the end of the next contract period. Note that it is envisaged that, as an infrastructure, ELSNET may take initiatives, offer services, and may be involved in a coordinating or advisory capacity, but that actual R&D work will normally be carried out by consortia of academic and industrial institutions.

The time span of the network programme is 3 years. A shorter period is undesirable since some of the planned actions (especially those where additional external funding will be sought) cannot realistically be started and concluded within less than 3 years. A thorough review of goals and accomplishments should take place after the second year, in order to provide a starting point for possible follow-up activities.

All actions are described in terms of Tasks, with a number and a short mnemonic title attached. A quantification in terms of person months and KECUs can be found in section 10 (Resources required). Note that some of the tasks are packages of sub-tasks, and that others describe principles or attitudes rather than tasks with well-defined deliverables. Yet they are included here, since the sum total of task packages should be seen as a checklist for external reviewers and for our own internal assessment purposes. For this reason new tasks and revisions of existing tasks will be formulated in terms of tasks and task packages throughout the lifetime of ELSNET-2.

Integration of language and speech

Task-1 Building and running the Network:

Task-2 Summer schools:

Task-3 Integration workshops:

Task-4 Books:

Task-5 Special sessions:

Task-6 Dissemination:

Task-7 Keyword search:

Task-8 Student journal:

Task-9 Information services:

Task-10 Curricula:

Task-11 Joint projects:

Integration and comparative evaluation of research results

Task-12 Common representations:

In order to arrive at better integration of research results, efforts are needed towards common interfaces and representations and towards resources integrating information relevant for both speech processing and text-based analysis. With a view to defining and promoting such interfaces, ELSNET will closely interact with national and European institutions; examples are ELRA (ELSNET contributing to validation of resources and related tools) and EAGLES (contributions to the development, validation, application and dissemination of upcoming or proposed representational or descriptive guidelines). ELSNET will serve as a forum for discussion, as an expert group for the definition of and experimentation with new resource models and as a validator of proposals for representations and interfaces.

Task-13 Evaluation infrastructure:

Task-14 Evaluation methods:

Communication and collaboration between academia and industry

Task-15 Bullet courses:

Task-16 Setting up an industrial panel:

Task-16a Preparing the Roadmap:

Task-17 Research workshops:

Task-18 Industry services:

Language coverage

Task-19 Linguistic resources:

ELSNET has established itself as an actor in the field of language and speech resources, for example through its resource production and dissemination work (speech corpora on CD-ROM, the ECI Multilingual Corpus, ongoing work on morphosyntactically annotated ``reference texts''). Although part of this activity is expected to be taken over by ELSNET 's `grand-child' ELRA, ELSNET will maintain an active role in this field as an independent think-tank, for example to advise on the design of new types of resources. A priority will be the definition and creation of an experimental corpus which integrates information for speech processing, syntactic and possibly other annotations. The definition and experimentation will at the same time serve as a validation of the proposals which have been made in EAGLES so far.

Task-20 Other languages:

Task-21 Eastern Europe:

Nodes

ELSNET was founded in 1991. There were 25 founding nodes, all academic. In the meantime the network has grown to about 60 academic and 40 industrial nodes (cf. separate list in annex).

For practical reasons the ELSNET-2 continuation proposal has been prepared and submitted by the nodes currently represented on the Executive Board: OTS (Utrecht University, Coordinator), CCS (Roskilde University Center), KTH (Stockholm) , IMS (University of Stuttgart), CCS (University of Edinburgh), LIMSI/CNRS (Paris), SST (Utrecht), INESC (Lisbon), CPR (Pisa); ILLC (University of Amsterdam) will withdraw as a Managing Node.

The proposal submitted for ELSNET-1 (1991) contained an extensive table showing which skills were brought to the Network by the 25 founding nodes. The overview demonstrated that the Network as a whole covered all skills judged necessary to accomplish the goals of the project, and since the number of nodes has now grown considerably, it should be clear that the necessary skills are all represented amongst the membership of the network, even better than before.

Management and Organization

Overview

The organisational structure established under the current contract, will grosso modo be maintained, although some additional structures will be set up in order to accommodate new types of activities, and to ensure better communication with industry.

The Network is made up of a Coordinating Node, a relatively small number of Managing Nodes, together with a larger number of Associate Nodes.

General administration of ELSNET is being carried out at the Coordinating Node, currently the Utrecht site, which will provide 80% of a senior academic as Network Coordinator, together with a highly qualified full-time Administrative Assistant.

The Extended Executive Board is a new structure. It consists of the Executive Board (cf below) plus the members of the Industrial Panel (cf below), and it is the main policy making body of the Network.

The Industrial Panel is another new structure. It consists of eight representatives from industry, preferably (but not necessarily) from ELSNET's industrial nodes.

The Executive Board is the main decision-making body of the Network, within the limits of the policy set out by the Extended Executive Board. The Board comprises one representative from each Managing Node, and the Coordinator.

Admission and nomination procedures

Coordinating Node:

The Coordinating Node and the Network Coordinator are appointed by the Executive Board, in close consultation with the Commission.

Managing Nodes:

Managing Nodes are those Member Nodes of whom a representative serves on the Executive Board. Managing Nodes are expected to possess a significant group of permanent staff with a strong research and training record in the NL and/or Speech area. As a group, the Managing Nodes should offer complementary expertise which covers the domain of Speech and NL , and there should already exist suitably strong links between them. In addition it should be ensured that the Executive Board can be seen as representative of the Network as a whole.

Academic Associate Nodes:

• The group should be internationally recognized, with at least 3 long-term staff engaged in a relevant research area; it should normally have a PhD programme or be prepared to accept placements of students who are carrying out PhD research; and it should be taking part in international research projects;
• it should submit a written account of recent research activities and a list of selected publications in the area;
• it should submit an account of its future research strategy and how this fits in with the goals of the Network;
• it should undertake to use (or take steps to obtain) electronic communication facilities (i.e. at least email and access to WWW) for Network activities;
• it should declare itself willing to actively participate in the activities of the Network, and indicate the nature of its possible contribution (e.g. membership of committees, participation in workshops, organising or hosting events).

Industrial Associate Nodes:

• The organization should have a proven record as a supplier or user of Speech and NL products or services;
• it should undertake to use (or take steps to obtain) electronic communication facilities (i.e. at least email and WWW) for Network activities;
• it should declare itself willing to actively participate in the activities of the Network, and indicate the nature of its possible contribution (e.g. membership of committees, participation in workshops, receiving trainees).

Decisions on the addition of new Associate Nodes are taken by the Executive Board.

Executive Board

As indicated above, the Executive Board is the main decision-making body of the Network, with the exception that the overall policy and priorities are established by the Extended Executive Board. The Executive Board comprises one representative from each Managing Node, to be referred to as members. The Network Coordinator is ex officio member of the Board, and acts as chairperson. Representatives of DG III (IT LTR Division) and of DGXIII E (LE programme) are invited to attend all Board meetings. In addition, the Executive Board may invite individuals with relevant expertise to attend particular meetings.

Executive Board (EB) members are individuals, elected by the EB from a list of candidates proposed by EB members and by Member Nodes. Only people working at Member Node sites in EU or associated countries are eligible. EB members are appointed for a duration of two years, and can be reelected. Vacancies on the EB will be announced publicly amongst the Member Nodes, and the Member Nodes will be given the opportunity to nominate candidates. The EB will draw up and publicize rules for the nomination procedure.

The Executive Board is empowered to set up standing or ad hoc committees with specific remits, which will report to the Board. Such committees at present comprise five Task Groups and the Finance Committee.

Procedures and meetings:

Voting will require a qualified majority in the following cases:

• changing the statutes as described in this section;
• selecting a Coordinator and coordinating site;
• starting and terminating committees;
• selecting or changing committee convenors; and
• adopting new Executive Board members and terminating the office of existing Executive Board members.

There will be a minimum of three Executive Board meetings annually. The chairperson will be responsible for calling an extraordinary meeting of the Board if requested to do so in writing (including electronic mail) by 1/3 of the members.

Industrial Panel

The Industrial Panel consists of eight representatives from industry, preferably but not necessarily from ELSNET's industrial nodes. The composition should take into account the various content areas and interests, as well as the geographical distribution. The members of the Panel are for the first time appointed by the Executive Board. Their term of office is two years, after which members are re-eligible. Once the Panel is in place new appointments will be made by the Extended Executive Board (cf below).

The role of the Industrial Panel is

• to define industrial needs to which the Network should be able to respond according to its objectives;
• to ensure that the actions taken by the Network are sufficiently application and production oriented;
• to act as an Industrial Advisory Committee to projects set up under the auspices of ELSNET.

The members of the Industrial Panel will be invited to work out their own internal procedures. They will receive logistic support from the Coordinator and his staff.

Extended Executive Board (EEB)

The Industrial Panel and Executive Board together constitute the Extended Executive Board of ELSNET. The Extended Executive Board is the body which is responsible for determining ELSNET's overall policies and priorities. The Extended Executive Board meets once every twelve months in conjunction with an ordinary Executive Board meeting, in order

• to assess the achievements of the past period in the light of the goals for that period and the overall objectives;
• to determine the overall policy and the priorities for the next period of twelve months;
• to appoint new members in case of vacancies in the Industrial Panel.

Procedures, Meetings:

The ELSNET Coordinator acts as the Chairman of the Extended Executive Board. The EEB is quorate is 2/3 of its members are present. The EEB meets once per year, in conjunction with an ordinary Executive Board meeting. On the request of at least 1/3 of the members of the EEB, the Coordinator will call an extraordinary meeting of the EEB. Decisions by the EEB require a majority of 2/3 of those present.

The Panel may give the Executive Board solicited and unsolicited advice on matters relevant to the Network, and may request that specific points be put on the agenda of Executive Board meetings. The Panel appoints one of their members as their representative, to participate in meetings of the Executive Board in an advisory capacity.

The ELSNET Foundation

For reasons of continuity, visibility and expediency, the Network has established a Foundation according to Dutch law, which will serve as an instrument for the Executive Board in cases where it is desirable for the Network to present itself as a legal entity.

The Foundation (under Dutch law) is a lightweight legal construction, which only needs a Board of individuals to govern it (there are no members other than the Board members). It can enter into agreements, hold property rights, open bank accounts, etc, just like any legal entity. Foundation Board membership does not involve any legal liability for the institutions who employ the Board members.

The Foundation will exist and act as an independent non-profit entity, independent of e.g. the duration of the Network contract with the Commission. The possibility of ELSNET entering into additional contracts with a variety of third parties, as well as the Commission, can be seen as a first step towards much greater self-organization in the field of Speech and NL .

In order to avoid divergence between the Network and the Foundation, there will be a one-to-one relationship between membership of the Executive Board and of the Board of the Foundation in the sense that for the duration of the ELSNET-2 project all and only Executive Board members are eligible to be members of the Foundation Board. This is reflected in the by-laws of the Foundation.

Finance Committee

A four-person Finance Committee has the remit of maintaining a budget, and disbursing sums within guidelines agreed by the Executive Board. All Task Groups are required to make a budget to cover their planned activities over a twelve month period. In addition, Managing Nodes are eligible to request funding, up to a certain ceiling, to cover the marginal costs of their coordination activities. On the basis of this information, the Finance Committee is required to make an integrated budget for the whole Network, which then has to be approved by the Executive Board. The Finance Committee has executive discretion to sanction `reasonable' expenditures (up to 5KECU) without prior approval of the Executive Board.

Task Groups

Task Groups are responsible for the implementation of the activities carried out by ELSNET. They consist of a small kernel (typically 3 members) for continuous activities, and are temporarily extended for specific projects (e.g. workshops, courses, events). They report directly to the Executive Board. Each Task Group has a convenor, and as far as possible, the membership contains equal representation of Speech and NL expertise. Each Task Group is responsible for a Work Package, consisting of a number of tasks as described in section Actions and Milestones.

Task allocation is done on the basis of decisions by the Executive Board, in the form of a quadruple: (i) a specification of the work to be carried out, (ii) a named individual who is responsible for the execution of the task, (iii) a deadline by which the task has to be completed, and (iv) a budget.

The following task groups (and their Work Packages) have already been put in place (note that some tasks are shared between two or more Task Groups):

Research Task Group:

The task is to identify and develop mechanisms for integration and convergence across the language and speech spectrum. For ELSNET-2 this will be implemented via task packages Task-3 (Workshops, in collaboration with the Training and Mobility Task Group), Task-11 (Joint projects), Task-13 (Evaluation infrastructure), Task-14 (Evaluation methods), Task-17 (Research workshops), and Task-20 (Other languages).

Training and Mobility Task Group:

The task is to identify and set up mechanisms for training and exchange of knowledge and expertise in the area of Speech and NL . The task comprises task packages Task-2 (Summer schools), Task-3 (Integration workshops, in collaboration with the Research Task Group), Task-4 (Books), Task-8 (Student journal), Task-10 (Curricula), and Task-15 (Bullet courses).

Linguistic Resources Task Group:

The task is to promote the development of multifunctional integrated resources for speech and NL. This includes definitional work, the creation of pilot resources for experimentation purposes and the validation and discussion of resources and resource models aimed at joint speech and NL research and development. This task comprises Task-12 (Common representations) and Task-19 (Linguistic resources).

Information Dissemination Task Group:

The task is to disseminate information within and outside the Network, in electronic and paper form. This task comprises task packages Task-6 (Dissemination), Task-7 (Keyword search), Task-9 (Information services), and Task-18 (Industry services).

Some general tasks will be the responsibility of the Coordinator (cf. section 9). The Coordinator and his staff will provide logistic, administrative and other support to task groups and others carrying out tasks for ELSNET.

Special Interest Groups

Whereas the Task Groups are typically task oriented, the Executive Board can establish Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in order to accommodate topic oriented cooperation activities, both within the network and across networks. An internal SIG on Multilinguality is being prepared. CompuLogNet has proposed to set up a form of collaboration with ELSNET which could be accommodated in the form of a SIG.

Each Special Interest Group has a convenor, appointed by the Executive Board. Membership is open to individuals from ELSNET or other networks collaborating in the SIG.

Special Interest Groups can apply for financial support for specific activities falling within the scope of ELSNET's objectives.

Role of the Nodes

The Network will function as an infrastructure, serving both language and speech communities, and both academia and industry.

The roles of the nodes can (with a few exceptions) be described in rather generic terms: academic nodes will play an active role in generation and dissemination of knowledge, and a reactive role in responding to needs expressed by industry. Industrial nodes will actively express their present and (perceived) future needs, and will absorb the knowledge provided by the academic nodes.

Most of the time, a specific subset of all nodes will have specific responsibilities:

• one node will act as the Coordinating Node;
• a small number of nodes will act as Managing Node, and be represented on the Executive Board;
• a small number of industrial nodes will constitute the industrial panel;
• a number of nodes will have (shorter or longer term) responsibilities in subcommittees or internal projects (e.g. courses, summer schools, publications);
• a number of nodes will be partners in projects initiated by or via ELSNET.

Although a number of nodes will be active when ELSNET-2 starts, it is envisaged that the set of actively involved nodes will vary throughout the duration of the project.

A number of mechanisms will ensure communication between the Executive Board and the nodes of the Network:

• The bimonthly newsletter ELSNews.
• The WWW pages.
• The electronic mailing list elsnet-list.
• Another electronic mailing list, elsnet-forum, only accessible for the ELSNET membership, has been set up for internal bidirectional communication. This will allow for continuous consultation of the ELSNET community.
• The contact persons for the nodes together constitute the Advisory Board.

Overall Coordination

General tasks

The overall coordination of the network is done by the network coordinator and his support staff. The main task is to keep the network running, and to coordinate and support the work done by the various task groups and committees. This task is covered by task packages Task-1 (Running the network), Task-5 (Special sessions), and Task-11 (Joint projects).

Infrastructure planning

For a large majority of nodes (especially the academic nodes) all necessary electronic communication channels are in place. Industrial nodes will be encouraged and supported in getting access to internet. Email and WWW will be the main electronic communication and dissemination media. The existing AFS infrastructure will be supported as long as it serves a useful purpose for the ELSNET community at large. It will be investigated whether it should be actively promoted.

Industrial Links

The task is to develop and implement strategies for involving industrial groups in Network activities, exchange of knowledge and expertise between industry and academia. This task will be carried out in close consultation with the Industrial Panel. The task comprises task packages Task-15 (Bullet courses, together with the Training and Mobility Task Group), Task-16 (Industrial panel), Task-16a (Roadmap), Task-17 (Research workshops, together with the Research Task Group), and Task-18 (Industry services, together with the Information Dissemination Task Group).

Eastern and Central Europe

In 1993 ELSNET has taken the first steps towards extending itself to Central and Eastern Europe, by successfully applying for funding to add 4 nodes in these countries to the Network. In 1994 this policy has been continued, and has led to a successful application under the Copernicus Programme, ELSNET Goes East. At this moment an Eastern European counterpart of ELSNET is being built up, and it is envisaged that the resulting Network will establish and maintain close links with ELSNET. One of the actions to be undertaken under the continuation of ELSNET is a follow-up application for ELSNET Goes East, which should ultimately lead to a Pan-European Network in Language and Speech. This task is covered by Task-21 (Eastern Europe).

Relationships with other projects or proposals

ELSNET has, by its nature, strong links with a number of ongoing projects and proposals:

• ELRA, the European Language Resources Association, can be considered to be a spin-off of ELSNET via the RELATOR project; close collaboration will be sought with ELRA as soon as it is operational.
• EAGLES shares with ELSNET an interest in evaluation and standardization. ELSNET is taking care of some of EAGLES' information dissemination tasks. Currently, the ELSNET Coordinator is an ex officio member of the EAGLES Management Board. The ELSNET work on the provision of a morphosyntactically tagged and manually corrected set of ``reference texts'' for German and Italian is based on the EAGLES morphosyntax specifications; a similar validation for the EAGLES syntax annotation proposal is envisaged. It is envisaged that strong links will be maintained with the successor project of EAGLES.
• ELSNET has good connections with a number of other Networks of Excellence in related areas (reflected e.g. a joint workshop with MLNet), and it is envisaged that collaboration schemes will be set up. First steps are being taken for joint activities with CompuLogNet, especially in connection with their industrial contacts. A meeting with the coordinators of a number of related Networks of Excellence is being organized.
• ELSNET and ELSNET Goes East have agreed to jointly collaborate with other COPERNICUS projects in the area of language and speech resources. ELSNET Goes East acts as a `information keeper' for LRE-copernicus projects TELRI, ONOMASTICA, MULTEXT-EAST, GLOSSER, BALTIC, GRAMLEX, PRACTEAST, BILEDATA, CEGLEX, BABEL and SQEL.
• A number of ongoing European projects have been conceived in the context of collaboration within ELSNET. Examples are Scientific Cooperation in the European Network in Language and Speech (HCM) and a project proposal submitted for funding via TMR.
• Numerous European programmes (e.g. ESPRIT, IT, LRE, Language Engineering, COPERNICUS, ERASMUS, INTAS) have connections with ELSNET via personal links and cooperative actions.
• Personal links are also providing effective communication with national projects in various member states.
• ELSNET maintains good contacts and collaborates with the main European professional organisations in the field, EACL and ESCA.