LINGUIST List 7.1655

Sat Nov 23 1996

FYI: Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. EAGLES editors, EAGLES results now available

 EAGLES Results Now Available

The Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards
(EAGLES) is pleased to announce that results of the EAGLES
initiative are now available on the EAGLES WWW server at:

	http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES/home.html

EAGLES (LRE-61-100) is an initiative of the European Commission
which aims to accelerate the provision of standards for:

* Very large-scale language resources (such as text corpora, 
 computational lexicons and speech corpora); 

* Means of manipulating such knowledge, via computational linguistic 
 formalisms, mark up languages and various software tools; 

* Means of assessing and evaluating resources, tools and products.

Numerous well-known companies, research centres, universities and
professional bodies across the European Union are collaborating
under the aegis of EC DGXIII to produce the EAGLES Guidelines
which set out recommendations for de facto standards and for good
practice in the above areas of language engineering. Some 200
individuals are involved.

The EAGLES initiative is coordinated by Consorzio Pisa Ricerche,
Pisa, Italy which also manages the EAGLES WWW server.

The work towards guidelines was carried out by five Working Groups: 

 Text Corpora 
 Computational Lexicons 
 Grammar Formalisms 
 Evaluation 
 Spoken Language 

As may be appreciated, we are engaged in a massive collaborative
exercise that is producing large volumes of documentation. The
project is steadily working towards full publishable quality of
the documentation and also widespread dissemination of
hyperdocuments via the Web. What is made available on the EAGLES
WWW server is to be understood in this light. The reader is
advised to read the Editors' Introduction which gives information
on the initiative in general and describes the currently
available documentation. The reader is further requested to note
the relative status of documents and their date of revision.
This latter information is to be found by following the link
'Browse the EAGLES Guidelines' from the home page.

As we are still in the process of converting documents for
mounting on the Web, certain links may be inactive (particularly
links between separate documents). Some documents have a low
density of links. In time, these deficiencies will be
rectified. At present, we beg the reader's indulgence: our
primary concern is to make material available as early as
possible, even if in draft or unrevised form. As revised and more
densely linked material becomes available, announcements will be
made via the home page and status information will be
updated. Thus, it is appropriate to re-visit the EAGLES Web site
at regular intervals.

Indeed, a further major concern is to receive feedback from the
wider community on the contents of the EAGLES Guidelines, thus
the reader is actively encouraged to contribute through
constructive criticism. Details of the feedback mechanism are
also available from the home page.

The EAGLES editorial board and coordinator would like to take
this opportunity to thank the many people who have been involved
in this enterprise. The reader will note that all EAGLES
guidelines appear under the authorship of `EAGLES' --- this
reflects the fact that numerous people have been associated with
the elaboration of a document, as members of the working group,
as writers recording a working group's proposals, as reviewers,
as evaluators, as advisers, as editors of a working group's
output and so on. We thus trust that the material offered here,
being the result of the best efforts of many people, will prove
of use in providing guidelines for best practice in our field.


Nicoletta Calzolari				Antonio Zampolli
John McNaught				 EAGLES Coordinator
EAGLES Co-Chief Editors

ceditortnos.ilc.pi.cnr.it