Language Engineering Research Workshop
Language Engineering Research Workshop
A United Kingdom language engineering project led by Dr Tony McEnery ofLancaster University has made contact with various groups that are working on languages such as. Bangla, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and Singhalese. It is already clear, the project collaborators say that South Asian languages are poorly served with language engineering resources both in general terms (for example,the provision of word processing software) and especially with respect to corpus building work needed to underpin the development of such resources. To gauge the extent of research in the language engineering of these languages field visits have been made to South Asia. The result of these collaborative efforts was the setting up of a research workshop last year at the National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai, India. The workshop involved eight researchers from the UK, fourteen from India and one from Sri Lanka.
The meeting lasted three days and it was agreed by all the participants that they learned much from each other. It is of course too early to identify specific. areas where this collaboration will be developed. It was, however,agreed that many potential subjects were identified, such as lexical tools,standardisation issues, new tools and algorithms and their evaluation.
In 2002 this successful workshop is to have a follow-up meeting to be held in the UK*.
It is hoped that this meeting will build on the start already made in India. Readers will be interested in the plans by the UK Group to engage the wider community both in the UK and perhaps in other countries. One result of the workshop reported here is a WordNet meeting held in Mysore. At this meeting the project leaders from Lancaster University Department of Linguistics & Modern English Literature have agreed to collaborate with the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore.
*Further details of the Workshop and the follow-up meetings together with information concerning the project contact:
Dr. Tony McEnery – mcenery@comp.lancs.ac.ukor on UK Tel: 01524 593024.
