Project Description:

In the last years, the majority of National Programmes in Europe in the field of HLT (Human Language Technologies) have identified Language Resources (LRs) as the first area to be supported by national funding, on the basis of consultations involving researchers, industry, service providers, etc.. Today, LRs are, in fact, unanimously recognised as a central component of the linguistic infrastructure, necessary for the development of HLT applications and products, and therefore for industrial development. The availability of adequate LRs for as many languages as possible and, in particular, of multilingual LRs, is a necessary condition for the development of a truly multilingual Information Society. The availability of LRs is also a "sensitive" issue, touching directly the sphere of linguistic and cultural identity, and is a crucial precondition for the participation of a language, and of the citizens speaking this language, in the Information Society. The proposed Network aims at improving cooperation among national activities established by national authorities for providing LRs for their languages. The action aims at:

• establishing a regular exchange of information;
• identifying and fostering possible synergies and cooperation;
• promoting the compatibility and interoperability of their results, thus facilitating the successful transfer of technologies and tools among languages and the construction of multilingual Language Resources;
• increasing the visibility and the strategic impact of those national activities in the field of HLT;
• contributing to the creation of an overall framework in which the public and private sectors, national efforts and international coordination could cooperate in order to answer the IST need for LRs.

The ENABLER questionnaire has been distributed in Portugal by CLUL, in order to include in the Linguistic Resources global network the work undertaken in Portuguese research and teaching institutions.