MLIAM: ISLE-International Standards for Language Engineering

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This is the first year of funding of a 2 year continuing award. The increased interest in multilingual information processing, which requires detailed mappings between languages, has highlighted the need for international standards, and agreed upon evaluation/validation procedures. We can no longer afford to (re)develop language resources for each new application; a shared broad scale platform of basic components is an absolute necessity as a common infrastructure to ensure the interoperability of systems through compatible interfaces and components that can be readily integrated and reused (plug and play). This project provides a framework for achieving international consensus on essential standards that would enable the sharing of resources and components on a global scale. The PI's approach builds on an already existing methodology for achieving consensus that has been developedvithin the EAGLES standardization initiative in Europe (http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES96/rep2.html). The PI will spearhead the formation of an equivalent American group, AIGLES, the American Interest Group on Language Engineering Standards (also French for eagles), that will join forces with the Europeans in the development of International Standardization for Language Engineering (ISLE). The underlying philosophy of the effort will be not to prove the truth or correctness of a particular theoretical approach, but rather to agree on a common format that can allow the merger of multiple sources of information. In order to move forward rapidly, coarse distinctions will be made initially and the results laterrefiner. (an approach that was anathema some years ago). The work will focus on three distinct areas the P1 considers the most critical for continued progress in multilingual information processing: standardization of multilingual lexicons, with lexical semantics; standardization of paradigms fornatural interaction inmultimodal systems; evaluation of machine translation systems and spoken language systems.