AVENTINUS plays a crucial role in multilingual information systems
To support multilingual information processing in the prevention and detection of drugs related offences, the AVENTINUS (Advanced Information System for Multilingual Drug Enforcement) project will build tools and components to demonstrate that language technology can play a crucial role in multilingual information systems. Europe's multilinguality creates huge bottlenecks within information processing systems serving national and international organisations and institutions. In Europe-wide drug enforcement, relevant information can be spread over several sources such as personal and police files, chemical references, and photographic collections. Even when information is computerised, it may be on different computers in different languages, which makes drug-related law enforcement slow. AVENTINUS aims to build tools and components, which support multilingual information processing. Intelligence information is currently available from a wide variety of sources, in differing formats (both structured and textual) and include multimedia sources, such as voice, videos and photographs. AVENTINUS will investigate how such information can be collated, profiled and presented to investigators without running into any language barrier problems. Lowering this language barrier in information processing is the main goal of AVENTINUS. The AVENTINUS project has been supported under the Language Engineering sector of the European Commission's Telematics Applications programme, the predecessor of the IST programme.