Collaboration Agreement between TTC and META-NET

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the STREP project “Terminology Extraction, Translation Tools and Comparable Corpora”, henceforth TTC, 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

TTC’s main purpose is to propose solutions to challenging problems related to language-based interaction, especially for translation in specialized domains and for languages with scarce linguistic resources. To this end, TTC develops methods and tools for the automatic extraction of terminologies from comparable corpora; it also develops tools for gathering and managing these comparable corpora and for managing terminologies. One of the objectives is that the proposed solutions can be rapidly used in an operational environment. All developed and existing tools will be integrated into a demonstration platform for download or usable via Web Services. This platform will be easily integrable into various translation processing chains. As a consequence, the benefits of the developed solutions will be assessed regarding the speed of generating terminologies and the quality of translation, and also regarding the amount of invested linguistic knowledge – so as to reduce the gaps in language coverage by requiring as little knowledge as possible.

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 network 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. Repositories can have a local or non-local (central) role. Local repositories are set up and maintained by organisations participating in the META-SHARE network, storing their own resources. Non-local (central) repositories are also set up and maintained by organisations participating in the META-SHARE network acting as storage and documentation facilities for resources either developed in organisations not wishing to set up their own repository, or they are donated or they are considered orphan resources, etc. 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

META-NET, through META-SHARE tries to build an ecosystem in the language resource production and distribution area. META-NET and TTC agree that, when TTC results will be made available to the language technology community in the terms expressed in the TTC Grant Agreement 248005, META-SHARE will be used as the channel to make these results public and accessible. To this end, TTC partners (henceforth TTC) agree that

1. TTC will either establish a local (partner-site-resident) repository of its own using META-SHARE or other appropriate software packages, OR will deposit its language resources to a META-SHARE non-local repository.

2. TTC will describe its resources using the META-SHARE catalogue metadata schema or will provide mappers from its own catalogue metadata schema to the META-SHARE one.

3. TTC will export its catalogue metadata and allow their harvesting by the META-SHARE central servers, thus populating the META-SHARE central inventory and making its resources visible and accessible through META-SHARE.

4. TTC will test and use the META-SHARE facility (software, metadata schema, etc), provide feedback and report bugs to the META-SHARE development team.

5. TTC will provide their additional user requirements to META-SHARE for discussion, adoption and implementation, or they provide integratable software tools implementing additional services.