Lirics Presentation

Objectives

• Provide ISO ratified standards for language technology to enable the exchange and reuse of multilingual language resources;
• Facilitate the implementation of these standards for end-users by providing an open-source implementation platform, related web services and test suites building on legacy formats, tools and data;
• Gain full industry support and input to the standards development via the Industry Advisory group and demonstration workshops
• Provide a pay-per-use business model for use by Industry and in particular SMEs validated during the project for the benefit of all actors in the content and language industries

Description of the work

The LIRICS Consortium brings together leading experts in the field of NLP and related standards development via participation in ISO committee and National Standardisation committees. The Consortium has strong Industry support and involvement through the 21 members of the LIRICS Industry Advisory Group.

The standards development work in LIRICS will start from an analysis of existing and emerging formats for the standards in the project scope. From this analysis the partners will then define and propose metamodels and data categories for lexica, morpho-syntactic annotation, syntactic annotation and semantic content following closely the procedures established by ISO with which the partners are already familiar, as well as an on-line environment for accessing and maintaining data categories.

The deliverables will be direct inputs to the ISO committee ballots. A quality assurance procedure within the project by partners on the ISO committee will ensure acceptance of the proposed standards at ISO level.

For these standards to have impact LIRICS will ensure their usability by both

• consulting with Industry when defining the standards via workshops
• providing test suites and APIs via the LIRICS open source reference implementation platform

The implementation platform and the web services offered will be the basis for the LIRICS exploitation plan enabling a new pay-per-use business model for language technology actors.

All these activities will be supported via a strong dissemination activity targeting end-users of LIRICS standards at demonstration workshops and a specific training session on NLP standards for partners of eContent projects.

Milestones and expected results

• a metamodel for lexical representation;
• metamodels and data categories for morpho-syntactic and syntactic annotation;
• reference data categories for semantic annotation;
• test suites in nine European languages;
• an open-source implementation platform, compatible with major legacy systems and tools;