Project Objectives
EU-US cooperation on HLT standards will build on joint preparatory work, to support all IST themes, HLT RTD and national projects, and HLT industry, by developing, disseminating and promoting widely agreed and urgently demanded HLT standards and guidelines for infrastructural language resources, tools exploiting them and LE products. The work builds on the successful LRE/LE EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering Standards), to tackle standards for multilingual lexicons, natural interaction and multimodal resources (new area requiring early standardisation) and evaluation guidelines for MT. Work is organised in 3 EAGLES Working Groups and several subgroups of experts, drawn from academia and industry to build consensus at international workshops. ISLE standards and guidelines will be validated in RTD and national projects, disseminated widely, yield maximum impact for minimum cost and enhance user experience of the information society through standards-based HLT.
OBJECTIVES
To develop HLT standards, in an international perspective within EU-US International Research Cooperation. To extend work of two previous successful projects on HLT standards, LRE/LE EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering Standards), thus continuing necessarily long-term standards work, and tackling innovative areas where standards are strongly required. To support HLT research and the HLT industry by developing, disseminating and promoting widely agreed and urgently demanded HLT standards and guidelines for infrastructural language resources as well as tools and LE products that exploit them. To build on joint preparatory EU-US work of the past 2 years towards setting up an international HLT standards oriented initiative. To promote EAGLES, initially the focus of individual EC projects, as an internationally active body for HLT standardisation. To contribute directly or indirectly to all IST key actions.
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
ISLE targets the 3 areas of multilingual lexicons, natural interaction and multimodality (NIMM), and evaluation of HLT systems. These areas were chosen not only for their relevance to the current HLT call but also for their long-term significance. For multilingual computational lexicons, ISLE will: extend EAGLES work on lexical semantics, necessary to establish inter-language links; design standards for multilingual lexicons; develop a prototype tool to implement lexicon guidelines and standards; create exemplary EAGLES conformant sample lexicons and tag exemplary corpora for validation purposes; develop standardised evaluation procedures for lexicons. For NIMM, a rapidly innovating domain urgently requiring early standardisation, ISLE will develop guidelines for: the creation of NIMM data resources; the interpretative annotation of NIMM data, including spoken dialogue in NIMM contexts; the annotation of discourse phenomena, and a specification and first implementation of multimodal annotation tools. For evaluation, ISLE will work on: quality models for machine translation systems and maintenance of previous guidelines – in an ISO based framework (ISO 9126, ISO 14598). There will be intensive interaction among the groups, as several topics lie within the sphere of interest of more than one group, thus broadly-based consensus will be achieved. The working groups and their sub-groups will carry out the work, according to the already proven EAGLES methodology, with experts from both EU and USA, working and interacting within a strongly coordinated framework. Responsible partners will recruit members from the HLT community (from both academia and industry) to participate in subgroups. Several international workshops are foreseen as a means of achieving consensus and advancing work. Results will be widely disseminated and published, after due validation in collaboration with national, EU and US HLT projects.
