Telematics Applications for Language Engineering - Preliminary results of fourth call
The European Commission, DG XIII, has released preliminary results of the fourth call for proposals in the Language Engineering Sector of the Telematics Applications programme, launched on 17 December 1996 (OJ No S 244 of 17.12.1996 p. 55). A total of 77 proposals were received in the Language Engineering Sector, requesting Community funding of ECU 92.5 million in total. Given the available budget for the call of ECU 21 million, this represents an over-subscription rate of almost four and a half times. Interest in the call came from all over Europe, with some 577 participants in the submitted proposals, including a number from Central and Eastern European countries. Apart from the broad geographical interest in the call, there were encouraging numbers of participants from industry (38%), and SMEs (25%). In particular, some 21% of participants are organizations with fewer than 50 staff. Some 30% of participants are user organizations, ensuring that projects are demand-led and relevant to user needs. Following the evaluation of the proposals, 23 have been recommended for Community funding, with a further three on a reserve list. The total funding recommended for the 23 selected proposals is ECU 24 million. The breakdown of selected proposals within the Language Engineering Sector is as follows: - Action line 1 - Pilot applications: 12 proposals, covering themes such as multilingual Web searching, interactive directory assistance, cross-cultural communication and training, voice-supported language learning, multilingual document processing, voice-operated driver information systems, multilingual tourism and travel assistance, translation management and routing, and multilingual aids for video archiving and museum catalogues; - Action line 2 - Language resources: 4 projects, aimed at developing language databases for police and emergency services, speech databases for voice-driven tele-services and in-car information devices, multilingual word nets and semantic databases; - Action Line 3 - Near-market research: 2 projects, addressing human-machine dialogue modelling and language data annotation; - Action Line 4 - Horizontal issues: 4 projects, providing support for the language engineering community at large. They cover evaluation of language engineering systems, promotion of research results and support of language engineering consortia, national help-desks and guidance for prospective users, language resources packaging and distribution, and inclusion of language engineering systems and technologies as a subject matter in translator curricula. The short-listed projects will now be considered by the Telematics Applications programme management committee, before the Commission makes a final decision on the projects to be supported. Contract negotiation should take place in the autumn, with some projects expected to get under way as early as November 1997.