Preparatory actions in the field of language engineering A call for proposals in the area of language engineering was published on 15 March 1994 (OJ No S 51 of 15.3.1994), with a view to: - Fostering active user involvement in RTD projects; - Profiling specific usage situation and application scenarios within the broad domains cove... A call for proposals in the area of language engineering was published on 15 March 1994 (OJ No S 51 of 15.3.1994) with a view to: - Fostering active user involvement in RTD projects; - Profiling specific usage situation and application scenarios within the broad domains covered by the language engineering (LE) sector of the Telematics Applications programme under the Fourth Framework Programme (1994-1998); - Laying down the foundations of future project clusters. A total of 95 project proposals were submitted. They underwent technical assessment in early June and were divided as follows: - Universities and non-profit research centres: 228 (45%); - Information technology industries, including SMEs: 162 (32%); - Others including public authorities and utilities: 69 (14%); - Private sector, other than the IT industry: 46 (9%). The distribution of resources (project partners and European Community) across categories of participation was: - Universities and research centres (100% additional costs): 39% - Private sector and user organizations (50% additional costs): 61% In spite of its limited scope, the call was very successful in attracting the interest of the private sector, including major IT companies, service/network operators, and SMEs specialized in speech technology and natural language processing, as well as user organizations including administrations and public utilities, service and manufacturing industries, and publishing houses. The 15 proposals finally retained for funding (total EC contribution: ECU 4.5 million) address a number of highly relevant application domains, including voice response servers handling telephone enquiries, authoring workbenches for technical writers in the aerospace and automotive industries, document management and report generation for health-care operators, computer-aided foreign language learning, access to and navigation in large textual and multimedia repositories, etc., as well as interrelated preparatory actions in the area of re-usable language resources, in particular speech and text corpora, lexica and terminology databanks, and the associated guidelines for encoding and interchange of language knowledge and data. Thirteen projects are due to start in November 1994 (two consortia decided to merge their proposals during the contract negotiation, and one of the proposals will be implemented by extending the on-going LRE project, EAGLES), with an average duration of 11 months. A public workshop will be held in October 1995, within the framework of the 1995 Language Engineering Convention and Exhibition, to present and discuss the results obtained and the plans prepared by the consortia. The text (TXT) field of this news item lists the 13 accepted project proposals.
