Korean Language Engineering: Current Status of the Information Platform

Language engineering implenicnts functions of a language and inforillation via computers. '['he need for language engineering plattbrms has been generally recognized and several researches are being undertaken around the worhl. Our goal is to establish Korean inforn-iation platform of linguistic resources and tools for Korean language and information colnumnities. The platform will support researchers and engineers with well-developed and standardized resources and al)plication tools thereby avoiding duplicate activities fi'om scratch a.nd ani-plifyiilg overall effort on the domain. This paper reports tile components and the current status of the project, and the importance of the effort. Language engineering is slich an activity that implements various fnnctions related to a language and builds lip an information base. It realizes linguistic activities of everyday life and linguistic competence of human beings with the aids of computer science, thereby supporting people's intellectual linguistic productions. The language engineering not only collects and disseminates tile informat, ion and knowledge of ~t language, among the linguistic society but also serves as a Younda-tion on which linguistic culture and ~echnologies can be based (Oh et al., 1994). Korean language engineering is one for Korean language. It came into birth in early 1980's with the emergence of personal comt)uters (PCs). hi *'Fhis work is fimded by Ministry of Science and 7~,clmology and Ministry of Education and Athletics, as a part of a contract by Center for Korean Language Engineering. the beginning, they focused on Korean alphabets and sonw scrappy parts of character processing, lacking the global view of the engineering approaches. Technical approaches to Korean began with the formation of the special interest group on Korean information processing under tile Ko-rea Information Science Society. And in 1994 (;enter for Korean Language Engineering (KLE) was founded to serve as a centrM organization for Korean language engineering, which aims to plan and progranl related projects an(i works in a consistent , systeinlttic way with long-teiun gems. It also incorporates academic and research institutes and hidustries into comnion goals: the etticient and imrmonious (lriw~ toward research and development , and establishment of long-range policies and strategies for Korean la.ngu~tge engineering. According to the level of technologies, KLE partitioned its projects into ttiree classes. Fundamental technology deals with radical and theoretical researches, collection and nlanipula-tion of data, and standardization. In linguistic viewpohlt, these include language [ornialisms, text corpora, and statistical int'ormation of a language. On infornlation enginee.ring side, the technology covers information interchange …