The EAGLES/ISLE initiative for setting standards: the Computational Lexicon Working Group for Multilingual Lexicons

ISLE (International Standards for Language Engineering), a transatlantic standards oriented initiative under the Human Language Technology (HLT) programme, is a continuation of the long standing EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering Standards) initiative, and is carried out by European and American groups within the EU-US International Research Co-operation, supported by EC and NSF. The objective is to support HLT R&D international and national projects, and HLT industry, by developing and promoting widely agreed and urgently demanded HLT standards and guidelines for infrastructural language resources, tools, and HLT products. ISLE targets the areas of multilingual computational lexicons (MCL), natural interaction and multimodality (NIMM), and evaluation. We concentrate in the paper on the Computational Lexicon Working Group, describing the preliminary proposals of guidelines for the “Multilingual ISLE Lexical Entry” (MILE). We highlight some methodological principles applied in previous EAGLES, and followed in defining MILE. We also provide a description of the EU SIMPLE semantic lexicons built on the basis of previous EAGLES recommendations. Their importance is given by the fact that these lexicons are now enlarged to real-size lexicons within National Projects in at least 8 EU countries, thus building a really large infrastructural platform of harmonised lexicons in Europe. EAGLES work towards de facto standards has already allowed the field of Language Resources to establish broad consensus on key issues for some well-established areas — and will allow similar consensus to be achieved for other important areas through the ISLE project — providing thus a key opportunity for further consolidation and a basis for technological advance. EAGLES previous results in many areas have in fact already become de facto widely adopted standards, and EAGLES itself is a well-known trademark and a point of reference for HLT projects and products. We stress the relevance of standardised language resources also for the humanities applications. 1 The EAGLES/ISLE Enterprise ISLE (International Standards for Language Engineering), a transatlantic standards oriented initiative under the Human Language Technology (HLT) programme, is a continuation of the long standing European EAGLES initiative (Calzolari, Mc Naught and Zampolli, 1996), carried out through a number of subsequent projects funded by the European Commission (EC) since 1993 (coordinated by A. Zampolli for the Consorzio Pisa Ricerche). EAGLES stands for Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering Standards and was launched within EC Directorate General XIII's Linguistic Research and Engineering (LRE) programme, continued under the Language Engineering (LE) programme, and now under the Human Language Technology (HLT) programme as ISLE, since January 2000. ISLE is carried out by European and American groups within the EUUS International Research Co-operation, supported by EC and NSF. ISLE was built on joint preparatory EU-US work of the previous 2 years aimed at setting up a transatlantic standards oriented initiative for HLT.