This meeting aims at bringing together the communities of
Spoken and Written LRs to foster integration between them
and to build a common vision of the future of HLT.
We think that working together on the preparation of a Technology
Roadmap for Language and Speech Technology offers a good
opportunity to discuss in rather concrete terms issues related
to the future of LRs and Evaluation.
In our view such a technology roadmap is a broadly shared
vision of our future, which identifies the main technological
challenges ahead of us, the prerequisites for addressing
them and their potential impact in terms of applications
or services they would enable.
We will start from the approach to roadmapping adopted in
ELSNET.
It involves defining independent milestones (these could
be a resource, a technology or an application) to be available
in a specific year.
Milestones are interlinked in various ways, as they may
require or enable other milestones.
The ELSNET Roadmaps are available electronically and can
thus be easily maintained.
On the
web site you can find an account of our approach and
an overview of the activities we have undertaken thus far.
For an initial overview of what we have, presented in a
graphical format, go here
and select LREC 2004 Resources Roadmap, where
you will find a very preliminary example of a roadmap showing
some advanced applications and the basic technologies required
for them.
The
results we have collected during the various roadmap workshops
and sessions we have organized over the last few years are
still being integrated, but in parallel we would like to
start our process towards consensus building, as it is clear
that a roadmap based on the opinions of a small group of
people can not be seen as a broadly shared view of a whole
community.
It is essential that we consult a larger cross-section of
our community to an agreement on milestones and their expected
year of completion.
As part of the consensus building process, we will be consulting
a number of experts on each of the topics of language and
speech technology covered by the roadmap in its present
form.
A Roadmap Task Force will collect the results, integrate
them in the roadmap if there is a consensus and put them
on the agenda of the meeting at LREC: some of the milestones
will be clustered to be presented together, while cases
where there is divergence between the experts' opinions
will require individual presentations and discussion at
the meeting, hopefully resulting in a consensus view.
We envisage that the co-ordination of the continued maintenance
of the language resources roadmap will become the joint
responsibility of COCOSDA
and ICCWLRE.
The organization of similar meetings at future events will
be one of their instruments to implement this.
Participation in the meeting is open to everybody and free
(there is no registration fee), but registration is mandatory
because of space limitations.
The meeting is organized by the ELSNET/ENABLER/ELRA Roadmap
Task Force - Stephan
Busemann (DFKI
and ELSNET),
Nicoletta
Calzolari (CNR-ILC
and ENABLER),
Khalid Choukri
(ELRA/ELDA)
and Steven
Krauwer (UU-LET
and ELSNET)
- with the collaboration of Paola
Baroni (UPI-DL
and ENABLER)
and Amy
Wall (UU-LET
and ELSNET).