CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure providing access to language resources and technologies for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It supports the use and study of language data in general and aims to increase the potential for comparative research of cultural and societal phenomena across the boundaries of languages and disciplines, all in line with the European agenda for Open Science. Data infrastructures such as CLARIN have recently embarked on the emerging frameworks for the federation of infrastructural services, such as the European Open Science Cloud and the integration of services resulting from multidisciplinary collaboration in federated services for the wider SSH domain. In this paper we describe the interoperability requirements that arise through the existing ambitions and the emerging frameworks. The interoperability theme will be addressed at several levels, including organisation and ecosystem, design of workflow services, data curation, performance measurement and collaboration.

Language resources (LR) are indispensable for the development of tools for machine translation (MT) or various kinds of computer-assisted translation (CAT). In particular language corpora, both parallel and monolingual are considered most important for instance for MT, not only SMT but also hybrid MT. The Language Technology Observatory will provide easy access to information about LRs deemed to be useful for MT and other translation tools through its LR Catalogue. In order to determine what aspects of an LR are useful for MT practitioners, a user study was made, providing a guide to the most relevant metadata and the most relevant quality criteria. We have seen that many resources exist which are useful for MT and similar work, but the majority are for (academic) research or educational use only, and as such not available for commercial use. Our work has revealed a list of gaps: coverage gap, awareness gap, quality gap, quantity gap. The paper ends with recommendations for a forward-looking strategy.

CLARIN-DK is a platform with language resources constituting the Danish part of the European infrastructure CLARIN ERIC. Unlike some other language based infrastructures CLARIN-DK is not solely a repository for upload and storage of data, but also a platform of web services permitting the user to process data in various ways. This involves considerable complications in relation to workflow requirements. The CLARIN-DK interface must guide the user to perform the necessary steps of a workflow; even when the user is inexperienced and perhaps has an unclear conception of the requested results. This paper describes a user driven approach to creating a user interface specification for CLARIN-DK. We indicate how different user profiles determined different crucial interface design options. We also describe some use cases established in order to give illustrative examples of how the platform may facilitate research.

ESICT (Experience-oriented Sharing of health knowledge via Information and Communication Technology) is an ongoing research project funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research. It aims at developing a health/disease related information system based on information technology, language technology, and formalized medical knowledge. The formalized medical knowledge consists partly of the terminology database SNOMED CT and partly of authorized medical texts on the domain. The system will allow users to ask questions in Danish and will provide natural language answers. Currently, the project is pursuing three basically different methods for question answering, and they are all described to some extent in this paper. A system prototype will handle questions related to diabetes and heart diseases. This paper concentrates on the methods employed for question answering and the language resources that are utilized. Some resources were existing, such as SNOMED CT, others, such as a corpus of sample questions, have had to be created or constructed.

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.

The paper describes some of the work carried out within the European funded project MEDAR. The project has three streams of activity: the technical stream, the cooperation stream and the dissemination stream. MEDAR has first updated the existing surveys and BLARK for Arabic, and then the technical stream focused on machine translation. The consortium identified a number of freely available MT systems and then customized two versions of the famous MOSES package. The Consortium addressed the needs to package MOSES for English to Arabic (while the main MT stream is on Arabic to English). For performance assessment purposes, the partners produced test data that allowed carrying out an evaluation campaign with 5 different systems (including from outside the consortium) and two online ones. Both the MT baselines and the collected data will be made available via ELRA catalogue. The cooperation stream focuses mostly on the cooperation roadmap for Human Language Technologies for Arabic. Cooperation Roadmap for the region directed towards the Arabic HLT in general. It is the purpose of the roadmap to outline areas and priorities for collaboration, in terms of collaboration between EU countries and Arabic speaking countries, as well as cooperation in general: between countries, between universities, and last but not least between universities and industry.

After the successful completion of the NEMLAR project 2003-2005, a new opportunity for a project was opened by the European Commission, and a group of largely the same partners is now executing the MEDAR project. MEDAR will be updating the surveys and BLARK for Arabic already made, and will then focus on machine translation (and other tools for translation) and information retrieval with a focus on language resources, tools and evaluation for these applications. A very important part of the MEDAR project is to reinforce and extend the NEMLAR network and to create a cooperation roadmap for Human Language Technologies for Arabic. It is expected that the cooperation roadmap will attract wide attention from other parties and that it can help create a larger platform for collaborative projects. Finally, the project will focus on dissemination of knowledge about existing resources and tools, as well as actors and activities; this will happen through newsletter, website and an international conference which will follow up on the Cairo conference of 2004. Dissemination to user communities will also be important, e.g. through participation in translators? conferences. The goal of these activities is to create a stronger and lasting collaboration between EU countries and Arabic speaking countries.

The NEMLAR project: Network for Euro-Mediterranean LAnguage Resource and human language technology development and support (www.nemlar.org) was a project supported by the EC with partners from Europe and Arabic countries, whose objective is to build a network of specialized partners to promote and support the development of Arabic Language Resources (LRs) in the Mediterranean region. The project focused on identifying the state of the art of LRs in the region, assessing priority requirements through consultations with language industry and communication players, and establishing a protocol for developing and identifying a Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) for Arabic, and to assess first priority requirements. The BLARK is defined as the minimal set of language resources that is necessary to do any pre-competitive research and education, in addition to the development of crucial components for any future NLP industry. Following the identification of high priority resources the NEMLAR partners agreed to focus on, and produce three main resources, which are 1) Annotated Arabic written corpus of about 500 K words, 2) Arabic speech corpus for TTS applications of 2x5 hours, and 3) Arabic broadcast news speech corpus of 40 hours Modern Standard Arabic. For each of the resources underlying linguistic models and assumptions of the corpus, technical specifications, methodologies for the collection and building of the resources, validation and verification mechanisms were put and applied for the three LRs.

The MULINCO project (MUltiLINgual Corpus of the University of Copenhagen) started early 2005. The purpose of this cross-disciplinary project is to create a corpus platform for education and research in monolingual and translation studies. The project covers two main types of corpus texts: literary and non-literary. The platform is being developed using available tools as far as possible, and integrating them in a very open architecture. In this paper we describe the current status and future developments of both the text and tool side of the corpus platform, and we show some examples of student exercises taking advantage of tagged and aligned texts.

KUNSTI is the Norwegian national language technology programme, running 2001-2006 inclusive. The goal of the programme is to boost Norwegian language technology research. In this paper we describe the background, the objectives, the methodology applied in the management of the programme, the projects selected, and our first conclusions. We also describe national programmes form Sweden, France and Germany and compare objectives and methods.

The EU project NEMLAR (Network for Euro-Mediterranean LAnguage Resources) on Arabic language resources carried out two surveys on the availability of Arabic LRs in the region, and on industrial requirements. The project also worked out a BLARK (Basic Language Resource Kit) for Arabic. In this paper we describe the further development of the BLARK concept made during the work on a BLARK for Arabic, as well as the results for Arabic.

MT started out as a ‘technology push’: more than 50 years ago, researchers had the bright idea of doing translation with the use of the newly developed computers. MT remained in the technology push area for many years. However, in the nineties we are seeing the ‘market pull’ beginning to play a role and there are good reasons to believe that this trend will continue. MT is going where the market and the users wants it to go, and MT will be prospering in the future. MT will be available electronically over the network, and MT will be available in environments which also offer a variety of other tools for translation, as well as tools for other types of information management. Also in research and in development of new technologies, MT will further develop, e.g. along the lines of knowledge-based MT, advanced integration of different analysis techniques (rule-based, statistics-based, etc.), integration with speech etc.