Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney.
Abstract
ISLE (International Standards for Language Engineering), a transatlantic standards oriented initiative under the Human Language Technology (HLT) programme, is a continuation of the long standing EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering Standards) initiative, carried out by European and American groups within the EU-US International Research Co-operation, supported by NSF and EC. The objective is to support HLT R&D international and national projects, and HLT industry, by developing and promoting widely agreed and urgently demanded HLT standards and guidelines for infrastructural language resources, tools, and HLT products. ISLE targets the areas of multilingual computational lexicons (MCL), natural interaction and multimodality (NIMM), and evaluation. For MCL, ISLE is working to: 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; create EAGLES-conformant sample lexicons and tag corpora for validation purposes; develop standardised evaluation procedures for lexicons. For NIMM, a rapidly innovating domain urgently requiring early standardisation, ISLE work is targeted to develop guidelines for: creation of NIMM data resources; interpretative annotation of NIMM data, including spoken dialogue; annotation of discourse phenomena. For evaluation, ISLE is working on: quality models for machine translation systems; maintenance of previous guidelines - in an ISO based framework. We concentrate in the paper on the Computational Lexicon Working Group, describing in detail the proposals of guidelines for the "Multilingual ISLE Lexical Entry" (MILE). We highlight some methodological principles applied in previous EAGLES, and followed in defining MILE. We also provide a description of the EU SIMPLE semantic lexicons built on the basis of previous EAGLES recommendations. Their importance is given by the fact that these lexicons are now enlarged to real-size lexicons within National Projects in 8 EU countries, thus building a really large infrastructural platform of harmonised lexicons in Europe. We will stress the relevance of standardised language resources also for the humanities applications. Numerous theories, approaches, systems are taken into account in ISLE, as any recommendation for harmonisation must build on the major contemporary approaches. Results will be widely disseminated, after validation in collaboration with EU and US HLT R&D projects, and industry. EAGLES work towards de facto standards has already allowed the field of Language Resources to establish broad consensus on key issues for some well-established areas - and will allow similar consensus to be achieved for other important areas through the ISLE project - providing thus a key opportunity for further consolidation and a basis for technological advance. EAGLES previous results in many areas have in fact already become de facto widely adopted standards, and EAGLES itself is a well-known trademark and a point of reference for HLT projects.Hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney
