A. ZAMPOLLI 
Towards Reusable Linquistic Resources 
Abstract 
i. The paper will try to identify the various concurrent factors which, in 
the last years, have contributed to the increasing attention paid to the 
issue of reusable linguistic resources for natural language processing. 
The role of various major Organisations (EEC, Council of Europe, DARPA, 
NEH, etc.) will be examined, taking into account the reasons which seem 
to have stimulated their active participation. The recognition of the need 
of reusable linguistic resources by various sectors of "automated 
linguistic data processing" will also be considered as a catalyzer for the 
recent trend towards the cooperation of various scientific and professional 
Associations (ACL, ALLC, ACH, etc.). 
2. Various interpretations of the term "reusability" have been proposed. We 
shall consider the relationships and differences between: 
the feasibility of the utilization of existing repositories of 
linguistic information, as potential sources for the construction 
of NLP Components; 
the feasibility of constructing new large linguistic knowledge bases, 
explicitly designed for multifunctional uses, in various research 
frameworks and development activities. 
In particular, we shall examine the connections between various core aspects of 
the construction of reusable linguistic resources, and 
the general problems of the "evaluation" in the field of natural 
language processing, both at the general level of shareability of 
the state-of-the-art knowledge, and at the level of specific NLP 
systems or linguistic data collection; 
the design of "standards" at the level of representation formalisms 
and of the identification of linguistic units and description 
categories. 
3. Examples will be taken by some of the various international projects 
nowadays underway in the field of lexica (ET7, Acquilex, Multilex, Genelex, 
The lexical Consortium, etc.), corpora (European Network of Textual 
Corpora, British National Corpus, Data Collection Initiative, etc.), and 
standards (Text Encoding Initiative). 
4. The paper will review and compare some of the results already acquired, 
and will state some problems, both at the scientific and organizational 
level which, in the opinion of the author, are still to be solved, and 
represent major controversial issues. It is expected that the round table, 
which will be held during the Conference with the participation of the 
representatives of some of those projects, will discuss these problems and 
indicate priorities for research, practicable ways towards their solution, 
and possible convergence of efforts. 
