Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe ELSNET and Europe What is ELSNET What is happening in Europe Steven Krauwer

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe What is ELSNET? European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies (funded by EU’s HLT programme) Unites key players in the field: some 50 industrial and 85 academic institutions from all over Europe Aims at facilitating R&D by sharing knowledge and expertise

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe How does it work? Roadmapping Building competence Information dissemination Transfer of knowledge Evaluation Resources Standards

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe Why interested in Asia? Mostly for selfish reasons (from the EU point of view): –considerable IT activity and competence in Asia, so teaming up will strengthen our position –expansion of markets for European industry (IT, e-commerce, e-content) necessitates crossing the language boundaries

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe Infrastructures in Europe

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe Europe (1) National level: –national science foundations (or their equivalents) –national nlp, speech and corpus programmes –local professional organisations or platforms Language level: –Francophone community (also outside Europe) –Dutch Language Union (Belgium & Netherlands)

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe Europe (2) International (some fully bottom-up, others set up with EU funding): –ISCA (cf. Julia Hirschberg’s talk) –EACL (cf. Wolfgang Wahlster’s talk) –ELRA (cf. Antonio Zampolli’s talk) –TELRI (language resources, mostly Eastern European)

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe Europe (3) European Union: various IT programmes typically project based always international, open to –EU members (15 member countries) –new membership applicants (e.g. Poland) –specific developing countries –associated countries (e.g. Switzerland, Israel), provided they bring their own funding –countries with special agreements (US)

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe Europe (4) EU’s Human Language Technologies programme (annual budget ca 35 Meuro): R&D projects on spoken and written language –Human-computer interaction –Inter-personal communication –Information access and management Support actions

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe Europe (5) Support actions (also outside HLT): –networks of excellence (e.g. ELSNET, I3Net) –research networks (travel funds for co-operative projects) –training networks –conference support –expert groups on standards and evaluation (e.g. EAGLES, ISLE)

Hong Kong, 7 October 2000 Europe Contact info ELSNET Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, NL Phone: Fax: WWW: