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A Network of Excellence forging the
Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

Collaboration Agreement between MultilingualWeb and META-NET

 

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the Thematic Network “Advancing the Multilingual Web”, henceforth MultilingualWeb, both established within Framework Programme 7, recognise the complementarities of their objectives and declare their intent for multi-level collaboration.

Scope and Objectives of the Participants

MultilingualWeb is a Thematic Network dedicated to the Web for languages of the European union and its trade partners. It aims at establishing a network between stakeholders for the improvement of the multilingual Web, in order to promote the adoption of current standards and best practices, explore the needs for future standards work, and create a basis for long-term synergies between participants, who are coming from a variety of disciplines. As the main instrument to achieve these goals, 4 workshops will be held, with the following topics: 1) Review of existing standards and best practices and gaps to be addressed, 2) Further review and discussion, with an emphasis on web content creation, 3) Further review and discussion, with an emphasis on translation tools, and 4) A topic to be decided by the project partners. Through these workshops and workshop reports, Face to face meetings and discussion about related practical work items - e.g. tools for checking Web sites with regard to requirements of the multilingual Web, educational materials -, the project eventually will create long-term synergies across a variety of disciplines.

 

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 and commercial tech- nology providers and language communities; to strengthen the European research com- munity through research networking and by creating new schemes and structures for shar- ing resources, that is the META-SHARE infrastructure; and to build bridges by approaching open problems in collaboration with other research fields such as machine learning, social computing, cognitive systems, knowledge technologies and 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 fora strategic research agenda, to support the sustainability of the European, multilingual in- formation society.

Areas of collaboration

 

META-NET is focusing on the European multilingual information society. The topic of MultilingualWeb is one important part of that society: the Web. In addition, more and more resources used in language technology are represented, exchanged and processed relying on Web technologies.

 

This broad view on the relation between the two projects also reflects in detailed areas of collaboration. The deliverables of the workshops in the MultilingualWeb project (meeting minutes and workshop summaries) provide direct input to various deliverables of META- NET. MultilingualWeb will benefit from the collaboration with META-NET by a deep dissemination of project results into the area of language technologies and new networking opportunities respectively. Deliverables of META-NET receiving input from Multilingual- Web are the following:

 

  • D3.2 “Report on Advance in the use of Context in Machine Translation”: The workshops will help gathering information about metadata available in the multilingual Web, and its applicability for the enhancement of Machine Translation.
  • D 4.1 “Software prototypes for the collection of parallel and comparable corpora from Hidden-Web, Web 2.0 and multilingual news sources”: The workshops will provide information about standards for representing multilingual data in these kinds of sources.
  • D 11.4 Summaries of detected gaps (ELDA): The workshops, especially the first one, will show technology deficiencies for multilingual applications.
  • D 12.2.1 Vision paper “European Multilingual Information Society 2020” (DFKI). The workshops will contribute suggestions on what gaps in terms of Web technology standardization need to be filled.

 

At least one participant involved in META-NET will join all MultilingualWeb workshops. This assures that the workshop results provide input for the deliverables mentioned above. In addition, MultilingualWeb will help META-NET to enlarge its network to users of lan- guage technologies – see the META-NET deliverable D 13.4 “Industrial Liaisons (DFKI)”. This will be achieved by presenting at “user” venues (e.g. tcworld, webtech conference) about both projects. At least one such presentation will be given, by one or more people who are involved in both projects.

 

Signed on behalf of MultilingualWeb

Signed on behalf of META-NET

Richard Ishida

Coordinator of MultilingualWeb

 

Hans Uszkoreit

Coordinator of META-NET