Building the Language
Resources and Evaluation Roadmap
Joint COCOSDA and
ICCWLRE Meeting in conjunction with LREC 2004 in Lisbon
30 May 2004
CALL FOR
PARTICIPATION
The first joint meeting of COCOSDA and of the new
International Committee for Written Language Resources and Evaluation (ICCWLRE)
aims at bringing together the communities of Spoken and Written LRs to foster
integration between them and to build a common vision of the future of HLT.
We think that working together on
the preparation of a Technology Roadmap for Language and Speech Technology
offers a good opportunity to discuss in rather concrete terms issues related to
the future of LRs and Evaluation. In our view such a technology roadmap is a
broadly shared vision of our future, which identifies the main technological
challenges ahead of us, the prerequisites for addressing them and their
potential impact in terms of applications or services they would enable.
We will
start from the approach to roadmapping adopted in ELSNET. It involves defining
independent milestones (these could be a resource, a technology or an
application) to be available in a specific year. Milestones are interlinked in
various ways, as they may require or enable other milestones. The
ELSNET Roadmaps are available electronically and can thus be easily maintained.
On the website http://www.elsnet.org/roadmap.html
you can find an account of our approach, and an overview of the activities we
have undertaken thus far. For an initial overview of what we have, presented in
a graphical format, see http://elsnet.dfki.de, and select “LREC 2004
Resources Roadmap”, where you will find a very preliminary example of a roadmap
showing some advanced applications and the basic technologies required for
them.
The results we have collected
during the various roadmap workshops and sessions we have organized over the
last few years are still being integrated, but in parallel we would like to start
our process towards consensus building, as it is clear that a roadmap based on
the opinions of a small group of people can not be seen as a broadly shared
view of a whole community. It
is essential that we consult a larger cross-section of our community to an
agreement on milestones and their expected year of completion.
As part of the consensus building process we will be
consulting a number of experts on each
of the topics of language and speech technology covered by the roadmap in its
present form. A Roadmap Task Force will collect the results, integrate them in
the roadmap if there is a consensus, and put them on the agenda of the meeting
at LREC: some of the milestones will be clustered to be presented together,
while cases where there is divergence between the experts' opinions will
require individual presentations and discussion at the meeting, hopefully
resulting in a consensus view.
We envisage that the co-ordination of the continued
maintenance of the language resources roadmap will become the joint
responsibility of COCOSDA and ICCWLRE. The organization of similar meetings at
future events will be one of their instruments to implement this.
Participation in the meeting is open to everybody and free
(there is no registration fee), but registration is mandatory because of space
limitations.
The meeting URL is: http://www.elsnet.org/roadmap-lrec2004.html
The LREC 2004 website is http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004
The meeting is organized by the joint ELSNET/ENABLER/ELRA
Roadmap Task Force:
Stephan Busemann (DFKI)
Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR)
Khalid Choukri (ELDA)
Steven Krauwer (ELSNET)