Collaboration Agreement between FLaReNet and META-NET

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, established within Framework Programme 7, and the Thematic Network “Fostering Language Resources Network”, henceforth FLaReNet, established within eContentPlus Programme, recognise the complementarities of their objectives and declare their intent for multi-level collaboration.

Scope and Objectives of the Participants

FLaReNet is a Thematic Network dedicated to creating a shared policy and to foster a European strategy in the field of language resources and language technologies. It aims at identifying priorities as well as strategic objectives, sustain international cooperation, and at providing consensual recommendations in the form of a plan of action for the EC, national organisations and industry. Work in FLaReNet is collaborative and undertaken in five thematic areas: a chart for the area of language resources and language technologies in its different dimensions; methods and models for language resource building, reuse, interlinking, maintenance, sharing, distribution; harmonisation of formats and standards; definition of evaluation and validation protocols and procedures; methods for the automatic construction and processing of language resources. The work in these areas aims at creating effects in three directions: policy, standards and outreach, especially towards the business, markets and end users. These are important challenges for the European multilingual information society, and FLaReNet is an important instrument to address them.

META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to the technological foundations of the European multilingual information society. Its main goals are to build a strategic alliance of national and international research programmes, corporate users, commercial technology providers and language communities; to strengthen the European research community through research networking and by creating new schemes and structures for sharing resources (i.e., the META-SHARE infrastructure); to build bridges by approaching open problems in collaboration with other research fields such as machine learning, cognitive systems, knowledge technologies, multimedia content. META-NET will lead to a strong language technology community with ties to other R&D communities, with a network into industry and public administration, and with visions and plans for a strategic research agenda, to support the sustainability of the European, multilingual information society.

Areas of collaboration

The focus of both FLaReNet and META-NET is the European multilingual information society. FLaReNet started in 2009 and has been successful in building a large network, including the language technology R&D community, policy makers, LT industry and end users. META-NET aims at a crucial next step: creating a large, sustainable alliance of stakeholders in these fields, and at preparing a strategic research agenda for the long-term development of language technology.

The following areas of collaboration reflect the relationship between the two projects:

• The plan of action developed by FLaReNet, identifying priorities, strategic objectives, and in- ternational cooperation with R&D groups and industry, is important input to the strategic research agenda to be developed in META-NET through its strategic vision building process. The two projects will assure that the plan of action will be taken into account within the strategic research agenda.

• FLaReNet is building a chart of the area of language resources, methods and models for language resource building, reuse etc. These efforts provide valuable input for the development of META-SHARE, the infrastructure for sharing resources. The two projects will assure that their activities in these areas are in alignment and will create synergies to a maximum extent.

• FLaReNet has already been successful in creating an international network of prominent researchers, industrials and decision makers in policy, standard development and various, also business oriented user communities. Both FLaReNet and META-NET will assure that the players identified in these fields will be taken into account while building the large, community-crossing alliance. In that way it will be possible to demonstrate a clear picture and a broad consensus, towards policy and decision makers.

The above collaborations will be assured by overlap of personnel: among others, the coordinator of FLaReNet and four members of the Steering Committee are also participating in META-NET. In addition, the areas of collaboration identified within this agreement are non-exhaustive and shall not prohibit any other area of common activities.