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With 24 official EU and many additional languages, multilingualism in Europe and an inclusive Digital Single Market can only be enabled through Language Technologies (LTs). European LT business is dominated by hundreds of SMEs and a few large players. Many are world-class, with technologies that outperform the global players. However, European LT business is also fragmented, by nation states, languages, verticals and sectors, significantly holding back its impact. The European Language Grid (ELG) project addresses this fragmentation by establishing the ELG as the primary platform for LT in Europe. The ELG is a scalable cloud platform, providing, in an easy-to-integrate way, access to hundreds of commercial and non-commercial LTs for all European languages, including running tools and services as well as data sets and resources. Once fully operational, it will enable the commercial and non-commercial European LT community to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets into the ELG, to deploy them through the grid, and to connect with other resources. The ELG will boost the Multilingual Digital Single Market towards a thriving European LT community, creating new jobs and opportunities. Furthermore, the ELG project organises two open calls for up to 20 pilot projects. It also sets up 32 National Competence Centres (NCCs) and the European LT Council (LTC) for outreach and coordination purposes., Comment: Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020). To appear

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 fundingfor langauge technology topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

In this paper we present the LREC Map of Language Resources (data and tools), an innovative feature introduced in conjunction with the LREC 2010 Conference. The purpose of the Map is to shed light on the vast amount of resources 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 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 unforgiveable 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.

The computational linguistics community in The Netherlands and Belgium has long recognized the dire need for a major reference corpus of written Dutch. In part to answer this need, the STEVIN programme was established. To pave the way for the effective building of a 500-million-word reference corpus of written Dutch, a pilot project was established. The Dutch Corpus Initiative project or D-Coi was highly successful in that it not only realized about 10% of the projected large reference corpus, but also established the best practices and developed all the protocols and the necessary tools for building the larger corpus within the confines of a necessarily limited budget. We outline the steps involved in an endeavour of this kind, including the major highlights and possible pitfalls. Once converted to a suitable XML format, further linguistic annotation based on the state-of-the-art tools developed either before or during the pilot by the consortium partners proved easily and fruitfully applicable. Linguistic enrichment of the corpus includes PoS tagging, syntactic parsing and semantic annotation, involving both semantic role labeling and spatiotemporal annotation. D-Coi is expected to be followed by SoNaR, during which the 500-million-word reference corpus of Dutch should be built.

The computational linguistics community in The Netherlands and Belgium has long recognized the dire need for a major reference corpus of written Dutch. In part to answer this need, the STEVIN programme was established. To pave the way for the effective building of a 500-million-word reference corpus of written Dutch, a pilot project was established. The Dutch Corpus Initiative project or D-Coi was highly successful in that it not only realized about 10% of the projected large reference corpus, but also established the best practices and developed all the protocols and the necessary tools for building the larger corpus within the confines of a necessarily limited budget. We outline the steps involved in an endeavour of this kind, including the major highlights and possible pitfalls. Once converted to a suitable XML format, further linguistic annotation based on the state-of-the-art tools developed either before or during the pilot by the consortium partners proved easily and fruitfully applicable. Linguistic enrichment of the corpus includes PoS tagging, syntactic parsing and semantic annotation, involving both semantic role labeling and spatiotemporal annotation. D-Coi is expected to be followed by SoNaR, during which the 500-million-word reference corpus of Dutch should be built.

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.