LINGUIST List 5.1012

Tue 20 Sep 1994

FYI: RIL network, ALFAL

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1. Thierry van Steenberghe, Announcement
2. Diane Ringer Uber, ALFAL

The Minister of the walloon Region of Belgium in charge of Research
and Technological Development, Mr Albert Lienard, who always expressed
his interest and his support for the theme of Linguistics and Language
Engineering, wishes that the Research and Development centres of the
Region continue to actively participate to the efforts in that domain.

As a consequence, the Ministry called for a consulting mission
consisting in the creation and animation of a network of competence
centres in Computer Sciences & Engineering and Linguistics, on behalf
of the Region.

The aim is primarily to foster collaboration in the field of Language
Industries and Computational Linguistics, in view to build projects, to
seek for funding, and to exchange information between universities and
other higher education institutions, industry and users, both within
the Region and in relation with other regions and countries.

The network 'Reseau Informatique et Linguistique', or RIL for short,
will have a coordination cell as a focal node, the present address of
which is in Louvain-la-Neuve.

The RIL network is not an additional structure which would somehow
compete with existing structures such as the international research
networks, or other bodies with a larger scope, such as the ACCT and its
network of Language Industries Observatories (among wich the OWIL,
Observatoire wallon des Industries de la Langue).
It should rather be viewed as an action to facilitate the information
flow between the actors of the domain, both within the Region and with
other regions and countries, in Europe and elsewhere.

The interfacing function offered by the RIL network should allow to
more easily and efficiently get in contact with centres wishing to
establish partnerships to prepare and propose collaborative R&D
projects.
The envisioned activities cover fundamental research as well as
technological development, but also care for the expression of needs, in terms
 of products or services, the encouragement to the creation of new companies,
 the commercialisation, and the utilisation of research
results.

 Themes in computational linguistics include:

 - fundamental research in computational linguistics, and
 - applied research for the creation of resources, methods, tools and
 systems:

 - resources: corpora, lexicons, grammars;
 - speech recognition and sythesis;
 - written text analysis, understanding, generation, synthesis;
 - multilinguality: translation, multilingual texts;


 Themes in language technology and engineering include:

 - speech: vocal command, dictation, rereading, vocal annotation;
 - written text: writing aids, verification, correction, version
 comparison, updating, annotation, hypertext links;
 - translation and multilinguality: multilingual writing, MT or MAT,
 translation aid tools;
 - document: creation, distribution, archiving, indexing, retrieval,
 annotation, integration of text, graphics, and sound,
 navigation systems;
 - telecommunications: document exchange, teleworking for groups and
 individuals;
 - person-machine interfaces: integration of technologies for the
 person-machine communication, data
 bases interrogation in natural
 languages;

 as well as specific applications, such as:

 - computer assisted learning and teleteaching;
 - applications for developing countries;
 - applications for the disabled and elderly;
 - and so on.

Any interested person or organisation is very wellcome to contact

Thierry J. van Steenberghe
 <tvsinfo.ucl.ac.be>

RIL
UCL=University of Louvain
Department of Computer Science
Place Ste Barbe, 2
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve [Belgium]

Tel.: +32 10 47 3150 [or 2081]
Fax : +32 10 45 0345
e-mail: <tvsinfo.ucl.ac.be>

 As the new Regional Delegate from the United States, I would like
to encourage U.S.-based scholars who work on Spanish or Portuguese
linguistics, philology and/or literature to consider membership in the
Asociacion de Linguistica y Filologia de la America Latina (ALFAL). ALFAL
was founded in 1964 with the porpose of supporting linguistic,
philological, and literary studies in Iberoamerica. The Association meets
every three years, holding sessions on all of these areas of inquiry, and
publishes a yearly journal, Linguistica.

 Dues are only US $30 for the three-year period 1994-96. New
members pay an additional one-time fee of $10. Subscriptions to
Linguistica are $20 per year. For membership information, please send name
and snail-mail address to:

 Diane Ringer Uber
 Regional Delegate to ALFAL
 Spanish Dept
 The College of Wooster
 Wooster, OH 44691
 tel (216) 263-2382
 fax (216) 263-2427
 Internet: duberacs.wooster.edu
 Bitnet: duberwooster.bitnet