INTEROP: Sustainable Interoperability for Language Technology

Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports U.S. participation in an international Network to work toward achieving interoperability among language resources, for which parallel European support has been provided by the European Commission eContentplus Programme. The Network involves members of the language processing community and related areas who are working to build consensus regarding the sharing of data and technologies for language resources and applications, interoperability of existing data and tools, and the promotion of standards for resource building and annotation. The participation of colleagues in Asia is also being sought. The resources and technologies to be addressed include annotated corpora (texts, audio), lexicons, ontologies, automatic speech recognizers, lemmatizers, taggers for all levels of linguistic phenomena, named entity recognizers, information extractors, as well as systems for search, access, and annotation. The creation and use of these resources span the field of linguistics and several related but relatively isolated disciplines within computer science and engineering, including natural language text and speech processing, information retrieval, machine translation, and the semantic web. The goal is to turn existing, fragmented technologies and resources developed within these groups in relative isolation into accessible, stable, and interoperable resources that can be readily reused across several areas. This project is being funded through the INTEROP solicitation in the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, with funding also from the Directorates of Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences and Computer & Information Science & Engineering, and the Office of International Science & Engineering.