Foreign Language Resource Center
Intended Audience: |
Managers, Software Engineers, Systems Analysts, Marketers, Web
Administrators, Designers |
Session Level: |
Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced |
The United States government Language and Speech Exploitation
Resources (LASER) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD)
is developing a Foreign Language Resource Center (FLRC) web site to
gather and display information on Human Language Technology (HLT),
including on machine translation. The objectives of this site
are:
- to enable industry, academia, governments, and non-profit
organizations to make better use of technology that is already
developed through integration and partnerships;
- to support language professionals, systems support, and
acquisitions personnel in selecting software appropriate for their
requirements; and
- to help planners identify critical gaps in available and/or
already purchased technology.
Challenges include:
- maintaining currency with evolving standards and best practices
for terminology and evaluation (e.g., International Standards for
Language Engineering; ISO Technical Committee 37 on Terminology and
Language Resources; Localisation Industry Standards Association);
and
- leveraging evolving resources, including Trans-European
Language Resources Infrastructure (TELRI)] Research Archive of
Computational Tools and Resources (TRACTOR) at http://www.tractor.de/; the MT
Compendium (John Hutchins, Walter Hartmann, and Etsuo Ito at
http://www.eamt.org/compendium.html), or sites maintained by
Language Technology World (http://www.lt-world.com) and
Multilingual Computing (http://www.multilingual.com);
and
- presenting such information consistent with best practices in
decision analysis to help users identify products to meet their
needs.
This paper discusses how companies and developers can best use
this website to inform the U.S. government, industry, academia, and
other governments and organizations of their products. It also
discusses these challenges, and solicits input from the Unicode
community on how to improve the site. An early version of the site
can be viewed at
http://flrc.mitre.org.
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