ELSNET and Europe

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ELSNET and Europe

• What is ELSNET
• What is happening in Europe
• Steven Krauwer

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What is ELSNET?

• European Network of Excellence in Human Language
  Technologies (funded by EUs HLT programme)
• Unites key players in the field some 50
  industrial and 85 academic institutions from all
  over Europe
• Aims at facilitating RD by sharing knowledge and
  expertise

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How does it work?

• Roadmapping
• Building competence
• Information dissemination
• Transfer of knowledge
• Evaluation
• Resources
• Standards

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Why interested in Asia?

• Mostly for selfish reasons (from the EU point of
  view)
• considerable IT activity and competence in Asia,
  so teaming up will strengthen our position
• expansion of markets for European industry (IT,
  e-commerce, e-content) necessitates crossing the
  language boundaries

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Infrastructures in Europe
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Europe (1)

• National level
• national science foundations (or their
  equivalents)
• national nlp, speech and corpus programmes
• local professional organisations or platforms
• Language level
• Francophone community (also outside Europe)
• Dutch Language Union (Belgium Netherlands)

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Europe (2)

• International (some fully bottom-up, others set
  up with EU funding)
• ISCA (cf. Julia Hirschbergs talk)
• EACL (cf. Wolfgang Wahlsters talk)
• ELRA (cf. Antonio Zampollis talk)
• TELRI (language resources, mostly Eastern
  European)

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Europe (3)

• European Union
• various IT programmes
• typically project based
• always international, open to
• EU members (15 member countries)
• new membership applicants (e.g. Poland)
• specific developing countries
• associated countries (e.g. Switzerland, Israel),
  provided they bring their own funding
• countries with special agreements (US)

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Europe (4)

• EUs Human Language Technologies programme
  (annual budget ca 35 Meuro)
• RD projects on spoken and written language
• Human-computer interaction
• Inter-personal communication
• Information access and management
• Support actions

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Europe (5)

• Support actions (also outside HLT)
• networks of excellence (e.g. ELSNET, I3Net)
• research networks (travel funds for co-operative
  projects)
• training networks
• conference support
• expert groups on standards and evaluation (e.g.
  EAGLES, ISLE)

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Contact info

• ELSNET
• Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS
• Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, NL
• Email elsnet_at_elsnet.org
• Phone [phone]
• Fax [phone]
• WWW www.elsnet.org