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A Network of Excellence forging the
Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

Collaboration Agreement between PROMISE and META-NET

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the Network of Excellence “Participative Research labOratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation”, henceforth PROMISE, both established within Framework Programme 7, recognise the complementarity of their objectives and declare their intent for multi-level collaboration.

Scope and Objectives of the Participants

The objective of PROMISE is to advance the experimental evaluation of complex multimedia and multilingual information systems in order to support the decision making process of individuals, commercial entities, and communities who develop, employ, and improve such complex systems. The overall goal of PROMISE is to deliver a unified environment where to collect data, knowledge, tools, methodologies, and bringing together the user communities, which are involved in the experimental evaluation. To this end, PROMISE will provide a virtual and open laboratory for conducting participative research and experimentation in which it will be possible to carry out, advance and bring automation into the evaluation and benchmarking of complex multimedia and multilingual information systems, by facilitating management and offering access, curation, preservation, re-use, analysis, visualization, and mining of the collected experimental data.


META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to the technological foundations of the European multilingual information society. META-NET aims at creating a sustainable net-work of distributed repositories of language data, tools and related web services documented with high-quality metadata, aggregated in central inventories allowing for uniform search and access to resources. Data and tools can be both open and with restricted access rights, free and for-a-fee. This network of repositories, META-SHARE, targets existing but also new and emerging language data, tools and systems required for building and evaluating new technologies, products and services. In this respect, reuse, combination, repurposing and re-engineering of language data and tools, play a crucial role. META-SHARE will eventually be an important component of a language technology marketplace for HLT researchers and developers, language professionals (translators, interpreters, etc.), as well as industrial players, especially SMEs, catering for the full development cycle of HLT, from research through to innovative products and services.

Areas of collaboration

  • Interoperable software infrastructures: META-NET is going to make language resources and corresponding metadata records available through META-SHARE; PROMISE is building an infrastructure for making evaluation resources available and exploitable. Both PROMISE and META-NET intend to achieve a certain level of interoperability between the two infrastructures. PROMISE intends to make available their metadata records to be harvested by META-SHARE using the OAI-PMH protocol.
  • Compatible resource licensing policies: both PROMISE and META-NET have the problem of making resources accessible (evaluation resources in PROMISE, language resources in META-NET) under clear IPR. Both PROMISE and META-NET intend to adopt compatible/shareable policies to make the resource landscape more uniform;
  • Evaluation and benchmarking of language resources: In the long term, META-NET intends to allow PROMISE to deploy the language resources gathered via META-SHARE to measure the impact of language resources on the performance of information retrieval systems.
  • Close communities: META-NET and PROMISE cater for neighbouring communities because of a common interest in languages. Both META-NET and PROMISE intend to improve the interaction and to lower the barriers between these communities.

 

Signed on behalf of PROMISE

Signed on behalf of META-NET

Nicola Ferro

Coordinator of PROMISE

 

Hans Uszkoreit

Coordinator of META-NET