n this paper, we introduce a new type of shared task — which is collaborative rather than competitive — designed to support and fosterthe reproduction of research results. We also describe the first event running such a novel challenge, present the results obtained, discussthe lessons learned and ponder on future undertakings.

In this paper we describe the new developments brought to LRE Map, especially in terms of the user interface of the Web application, of the searching of the information therein, and of the data model updates.

This proposal describes a new way to visualise resources in the LREMap, a community-built repository of language resource descriptions and uses. The LREMap is represented as a force-directed graph, where resources, papers and authors are nodes. The analysis of the visual representation of the underlying graph is used to study how the community gathers around LRs and how LRs are used in research.

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

This paper presents META-SHARE (www.meta-share.eu), an open language resource infrastructure, and its usage since its Europe-wide deployment in early 2013. META-SHARE is a network of repositories that store language resources (data, tools and processing services) documented with high-quality metadata, aggregated in central inventories allowing for uniform search and access. META-SHARE was developed by META-NET (www.meta-net.eu) and aims to serve as an important component of a language technology marketplace for researchers, developers, professionals and industrial players, catering for the full development cycle of language technology, from research through to innovative products and services. The observed usage in its initial steps, the steadily increasing number of network nodes, resources, users, queries, views and downloads are all encouraging and considered as supportive of the choices made so far. In tandem, take-up activities like direct linking and processing of datasets by language processing services as well as metadata transformation to RDF are expected to open new avenues for data and resources linking and boost the organic growth of the infrastructure while facilitating language technology deployment by much wider research communities and industrial sectors.

The FLaReNet Strategic Agenda highlights the most pressing needs for the sector of Language Resources and Technologies and presents a set of recommendations for its development and progress in Europe, as issued from a three-year consultation of the FLaReNet European project. The FLaReNet recommendations are organised around nine dimensions: a) documentation b) interoperability c) availability, sharing and distribution d) coverage, quality and adequacy e) sustainability f) recognition g) development h) infrastructure and i) international cooperation. As such, they cover a broad range of topics and activities, spanning over production and use of language resources, licensing, maintenance and preservation issues, infrastructures for language resources, resource identification and sharing, evaluation and validation, interoperability and policy issues. The intended recipients belong to a large set of players and stakeholders in Language Resources and Technology, ranging from individuals to research and education institutions, to policy-makers, funding agencies, SMEs and large companies, service and media providers. The main goal of these recommendations is to serve as an instrument to support stakeholders in planning for and addressing the urgencies of the Language Resources and Technologies of the future.

Accurate and reliable documentation of Language Resources is an undisputable need: documentation is the gateway to discovery of Language Resources, a necessary step towards promoting the data economy. Language resources that are not documented virtually do not exist: for this reason every initiative able to collect and harmonise metadata about resources represents a valuable opportunity for the NLP community. In this paper we describe the LRE Map, reporting statistics on resources associated with LREC2012 papers and providing comparisons with LREC2010 data. The LRE Map, jointly launched by FLaReNet and ELRA in conjunction with the LREC 2010 Conference, is an instrument for enhancing availability of information about resources, either new or already existing ones. It wants to reinforce and facilitate the use of standards in the community. The LRE Map web interface provides the possibility of searching according to a fixed set of metadata and to view the details of extracted resources. The LRE Map is continuing to collect bottom-up input about resources from authors of other conferences through standard submission process. This will help broadening the notion of “language resources” and attract to the field neighboring disciplines that so far have been only marginally involved by the standard notion of language resources.

Relations among phenomena at different linguistic levels are at the essence of language properties but today we focus mostly on one specific linguistic layer at a time, without (having the possibility of) paying attention to the relations among the different layers. At the same time our efforts are too much scattered without much possibility of exploiting other people's achievements. To address the complexities hidden in multilayer interrelations even small amounts of processed data can be useful, improving the performance of complex systems. Exploiting the current trend towards sharing we want to initiate a collective movement that works towards creating synergies and harmonisation among different annotation efforts that are now dispersed. In this paper we present the general architecture of the Language Library, an initiative which is conceived as a facility for gathering and making available through simple functionalities the linguistic knowledge the field is able to produce, putting in place new ways of collaboration within the LRT community. In order to reach this goal, a first population round of the Language Library has started around a core of parallel/comparable texts that have been annotated by several contributors submitting a paper for LREC2012. The Language Library has also an ancillary aim related to language documentation and archiving and it is conceived as a theory-neutral space which allows for several language processing philosophies to coexist.

This paper describes a Web service for accessing WordNet-type semantic lexicons. The central idea behind the service design is: given a query, the primary functionality of lexicon access is to present a partial lexicon by extracting the relevant part of the target lexicon. Based on this idea, we implemented the system as a RESTful Web service whose input query is specified by the access URI and whose output is presented in a standardized XML data format. LMF, an ISO standard for modeling lexicons, plays the most prominent role: the access URI pattern basically reflects the lexicon structure as defined by LMF; the access results are rendered based on Wordnet-LMF, which is a version of LMF XML-serialization. The Web service currently provides accesses to Princeton WordNet, Japanese WordNet, as well as the EDR Electronic Dictionary as a trial. To accommodate the EDR dictionary within the same framework, we modeled it also as a WordNet-type semantic lexicon. This paper thus argues possible alternatives to model innately bilingual/multilingual lexicons like EDR with LMF, and proposes possible revisions to Wordnet-LMF.

In this paper we present the LREC Map of Language Resources and Tools, an innovative feature introduced with this LREC. The purpose of the Map is to shed light on the vast amount of resources and tools that represent the background of the research presented at LREC, in the attempt to fill in a gap in the community knowledge about the resources and tools that are used or created worldwide. It also aims at a change of culture in the field, actively engaging each researcher in the documentation task about resources. The Map has been developed on the basis of the information provided by LREC authors during the submission of papers to the LREC 2010 conference and the LREC workshops, and contains information about almost 2000 resources. The paper illustrates the motivation behind this initiative, its main characteristics, its relevance and future impact in the field, the metadata used to describe the resources, and finally presents some of the most relevant findings.

LRs remain expensive to create and thus rare relative to demand across languages and technology types. The accidental re-creation of an LR that already exists is a nearly unforgivable waste of scarce resources that is unfortunately not so easy to avoid. The number of catalogs the HLT researcher must search, with their different formats, make it possible to overlook an existing resource. This paper sketches the sources of this problem and outlines a proposal to rectify along with a new vision of LR cataloging that will to facilitates the documentation and exploitation of a much wider range of LRs than previously considered.

In order to overcome the fragmentation that affects the field of Language Resources and Technologies, an Open and Distributed Resource Infrastructure is the necessary step for building on each other achievements, integrating resources and technologies and avoiding dispersed or conflicting efforts. Since this endeavour represents a true cultural turnpoint in the LRs field, it needs a careful preparation, both in terms of acceptance by the community and thoughtful investigation of the various technical, organisational and practical aspects implied. To achieve this, we need to act as a community able to join forces on a set of shared priorities and we need to act at a worldwide level. FLaReNet ― Fostering Language Resources Network ― is a Thematic Network funded under the EU eContent program that aims at developing the needed common vision and fostering a European and International strategy for consolidating the sector, thus enhancing competitiveness at EU level and worldwide. In this paper we present the activities undertaken by FLaReNet in order to prepare and support the establishment of such an Infrastructure, which is becoming now a reality within the new MetaNet initiative.

Currently, research infrastructures are being designed and established in many disciplines since they all suffer from an enormous fragmentation of their resources and tools. In the domain of language resources and tools the CLARIN initiative has been funded since 2008 to overcome many of the integration and interoperability hurdles. CLARIN can build on knowledge and work from many projects that were carried out during the last years and wants to build stable and robust services that can be used by researchers. Here service centres will play an important role that have the potential of being persistent and that adhere to criteria as they have been established by CLARIN. In the last year of the so-called preparatory phase these centres are currently developing four use cases that can demonstrate how the various pillars CLARIN has been working on can be integrated. All four use cases fulfil the criteria of being cross-national.

In this paper we address the issue of developing an interoperable infrastructure for language resources and technologies. In our approach, called UFRA, we extend the Federate Database Architecture System adding typical functionalities caming from UIMA. In this way, we capitalize the advantages of a federated architecture, such as autonomy, heterogeneity and distribution of components, monitored by a central authority responsible for checking both the integration of components and user rights on performing different tasks. We use the UIMA approach to manage and define one common front-end, enabling users and clients to query, retrieve and use language resources and technologies. The purpose of this paper is to show how UIMA leads from a Federated Database Architecture to a Federated Resource Architecture, adding to a registry of available components both static resources such as lexicons and corpora and dynamic ones such as tools and general purpose language technologies. At the end of the paper, we present a case-study that adopts this framework to integrate the SIMPLE lexicon and TIMEML annotation guidelines to tag natural language texts.

This paper discusses ontologization of lexicon access functions in the context of a service-oriented language infrastructure, such as the Language Grid. In such a language infrastructure, an access function to a lexical resource, embodied as an atomic Web service, plays a crucially important role in composing a composite Web service tailored to a user’s specific requirement. To facilitate the composition process involving service discovery, planning and invocation, the language infrastructure should be ontology-based; hence the ontologization of a range of lexicon functions is highly required. In a service-oriented environment, lexical resources however can be classified from a service-oriented perspective rather than from a lexicographically motivated standard. Hence to address the issue of interoperability, the taxonomy for lexical resources should be ground to principled and shared lexicon ontology. To do this, we have ontologized the standardized lexicon modeling framework LMF, and utilized it as a foundation to stipulate the service-oriented lexicon taxonomy and the corresponding ontology for lexicon access functions. This paper also examines a possible solution to fill the gap between the ontological descriptions and the actual Web service API by adopting a W3C recommendation SAWSDL, with which Web service descriptions can be linked with the domain ontology.

This paper describes the design, implementation and population of a lexical resource for biology and bioinformatics (the BioLexicon) developed within an ongoing European project. The aim of this project is text-based knowledge harvesting for support to information extraction and text mining in the biomedical domain. The BioLexicon is a large-scale lexical-terminological resource encoding different information types in one single integrated resource. In the design of the resource we follow the ISO/DIS 24613 “Lexical Mark-up Framework” standard, which ensures reusability of the information encoded and easy exchange of both data and architecture. The design of the resource also takes into account the needs of our text mining partners who automatically extract syntactic and semantic information from texts and feed it to the lexicon. The present contribution first describes in detail the model of the BioLexicon along its three main layers: morphology, syntax and semantics; then, it briefly describes the database implementation of the model and the population strategy followed within the project, together with an example. The BioLexicon database in fact comes equipped with automatic uploading procedures based on a common exchange XML format, which guarantees that the lexicon can be properly populated with data coming from different sources.

EVALITA 2007, the first edition of the initiative devoted to the evaluation of Natural Language Processing tools for Italian, provided a shared framework where participants’ systems had the possibility to be evaluated on five different tasks, namely Part of Speech Tagging (organised by the University of Bologna), Parsing (organised by the University of Torino), Word Sense Disambiguation (organised by CNR-ILC, Pisa), Temporal Expression Recognition and Normalization (organised by CELCT, Trento), and Named Entity Recognition (organised by FBK, Trento). We believe that the diffusion of shared tasks and shared evaluation practices is a crucial step towards the development of resources and tools for Natural Language Processing. Experiences of this kind, in fact, are a valuable contribution to the validation of existing models and data, allowing for consistent comparisons among approaches and among representation schemes. The good response obtained by EVALITA, both in the number of participants and in the quality of results, showed that pursuing such goals is feasible not only for English, but also for other languages.

We outline work performed within the framework of a current EC project. The goal is to construct a language-independent information system for a specific domain (environment/ecology/biodiversity) anchored in a language-independent ontology that is linked to wordnets in seven languages. For each language, information extraction and identification of lexicalized concepts with ontological entries is carried out by text miners (“Kybots”). The mapping of language-specific lexemes to the ontology allows for crosslinguistic identification and translation of equivalent terms. The infrastructure developed within this project enables long-range knowledge sharing and transfer across many languages and cultures, addressing the need for global and uniform transition of knowledge beyond the specific domains addressed here.

Within the CLARIN e-science infrastructure project it is foreseen to develop a component-based registry for metadata for Language Resources and Language Technology. With this registry it is hoped to overcome the problems of the current available systems with respect to inflexible fixed schema, unsuitable terminology and interoperability problems. The registry will address interoperability needs by refering to a shared vocabulary registered in data category registries as they are suggested by ISO.

Corpus-based approaches and statistical approaches have been the main stream of natural language processing research for the past two decades. Language resources play a key role in such approaches, but there is an insufficient amount of language resources in many Asian languages. In this situation, standardisation of language resources would be of great help in developing resources in new languages. This paper presents the latest development efforts of our project which aims at creating a common standard for Asian language resources that is compatible with an international standard. In particular, the paper focuses on i) lexical specification and data categories relevant for building multilingual lexical resources for Asian languages; ii) a core upper-layer ontology needed for ensuring multilingual interoperability and iii) the evaluation platform used to test the entire architectural framework.

This paper presents a case study concerning the challenges and requirements posed by next generation language resources, realized as an overall model of open, distributed and collaborative language infrastructure. If a sort of “new paradigm” for language resource sharing is required, we think that the emerging and still evolving technology connected to Grid computing is a very interesting and suitable one for a concrete realization of this vision. Given the current limitations of Grid computing, it is very important to test the new environment on basic language analysis tools, in order to get the feeling of what are the potentialities and possible limitations connected to its use in NLP. For this reason, we have done some experiments on a module of the Linguistic Miner, i.e. the extraction of linguistic patterns from restricted domain corpora. The Grid environment has produced the expected results (reduction of the processing time, huge storage capacity, data redundancy) without any additional cost for the final user.

Optimizing the production, maintenance and extension of lexical resources is one the crucial aspects impacting Natural Language Processing (NLP). A second aspect involves optimizing the process leading to their integration in applications. With this respect, we believe that the production of a consensual specification on lexicons can be a useful aid for the various NLP actors. Within ISO, the purpose of LMF is to define a standard for lexicons. LMF is a model that provides a common standardized framework for the construction of NLP lexicons. The goals of LMF are to provide a common model for the creation and use of lexical resources, to manage the exchange of data between and among these resources, and to enable the merging of large number of individual electronic resources to form extensive global electronic resources. In this paper, we describe the work in progress within the sub-group ISO-TC37/SC4/WG4. Various experts from a lot of countries have been consulted in order to take into account best practices in a lot of languages for (we hope) all kinds of NLP lexicons.

The goal of this paper is (1) to illustrate a specific procedure for merging different monolingual lexicons, focussing on techniques for detecting and mapping equivalent lexical entries, and (2) to sketch a production model that enables one to obtain lexical resources via unification of existing data. We describe the creation of a Unified Lexicon (UL) from a common sample of the Italian PAROLE-SIMPLE-CLIPS phonological lexicon and of the Italian LCSTAR pronunciation lexicon. We expand previous experiments carried out at ILC-CNR: based on a detailed mechanism for mapping grammatical classifications of candidate UL entries, a consensual set of Unified Morphosyntactic Specifications (UMS) shared by lexica for the written and spoken areas is proposed. The impact of the UL on cross-validation issues is analysed: by looking into conflicts, mismatches and diverging classifications can be detected in both resources. The work presented is in line with the activities promoted by ELRA towards the development of methods for packaging new language resources by combining independently created resources, and was carried out as part of the ELRA Production Committee activities. ELRA aims to exploit the UL experience to carry out such merging activities for resources available on the ELRA catalogue in order to fulfill the users' needs.

In this paper we present LeXFlow, a web application framework where lexicons already expressed in standardised format semi-automatically interact by reciprocally enriching themselves. LeXFlow is intended for, on the one hand, paving the way to the development of dynamic multi-source lexicons; and on the other, for fostering the adoption of standards. Borrowing from techniques used in the domain of document workflows, we model the activity of lexicon management as a particular case of workflow instance, where lexical entries move across agents and become dynamically updated. To this end, we have designed a lexical flow (LF) corresponding to the scenario where an entry of a lexicon A becomes enriched via basically two steps. First, by virtue of being mapped onto a corresponding entry belonging to a lexicon B, the entry(LA) inherits the semantic relations available in lexicon B. Second, by resorting to an automatic application that acquires information about semantic relations from corpora, the relations acquired are integrated into the entry and proposed to the human encoder. As a result of the lexical flow, in addition, for each starting lexical entry(LA) mapped onto a corresponding entry(LB) the flow produces a new entry representing the merging of the original two.

This paper reports on the multilingual Language Resources (MLRs), i.e. parallel corpora and terminological lexicons for less widely digitally available languages, that have been developed in the INTERA project and the methodology adopted for their production. Special emphasis is given to the reality factors that have influenced the MLRs development approach and their final constitution. Building on the experience gained in the project, a production model has been elaborated, suggesting ways and techniques that can be exploited in order to improve LRs production taking into account realistic issues.

The ISLE project is a continuation of the long standing EAGLES initiative, carried out under the Human Language Technology (HLT) programme in collaboration between American and European groups in the framework of the EU-US International Research Co-operation, supported by NSF and EC. In this paper we concentrate on the current position of the ISLE Computational Lexicon Working Group (CLWG), whose activities aim at defining a general schema for a multilingual lexical entry (MILE), as the basis for a standard framework for multilingual computational lexicons. The needs and features of existing Machine Translation systems provide the main reference points for the process of consensual definition of the MILE. The overall structure of the MILE will be illustrated with particular attention to some of the issues raised for multilingual lexicons by the need of expressing complex transfer conditions among translation equivalents

The paper aims at providing an overview of the situation of Language Resources (LR) in Europe, in particular as emerging from a few European projects regarding the construction of large-scale harmonised resources to be used for many applicative purpose, also of multilingual nature. An important research aspect of the projects is given by the very fact that the large enterprise described is, at our knowledge, the first attempt at developing wide-coverage lexicons for so many languages (12 European languages), with a harmonised common model, and with encoding of structured "semantic types" and semantic (subcategorisation) frames on a large scale. Reaching a common agreed model grounded on sound theoretical approaches within a very large consortium is in itself a challenging task. The actual lexicons will then provide a framework for testing and evaluating the maturity of the current state-of-the-art in lexical semantics grounded on, and connected to. a syntactic foundation. Another research aspect is provided by the recognition of the necessity of accompanying these "static" lexicons with dynamic means of acquiring lexical information from large corpora. This is one of the challenging research aspects of a global strategy for building a large and useful multilingual LR infrastructure.

This paper aims at providing a broad overview of the situation in Europe during the past few years, regarding efforts and concerted actions towards the standardization of large language resources, with particular emphasis on what is taking place in the fields of Computational Lexicons and Text Corpora. Attention will be focused on the plans, work in progress, and a few preliminary results of the LRE project EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards).