LANGUAGE PROCESSING R&D PROGRAMMES 
DIRECTORATE XIII E OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION 
Roberto Cencioni. Giovanni Battista Varile 
{Roberto. Cencioni, Nino. Vari le } Oeurokom. ie 
European Commission 
DG XIII E 4 - .lean Monnet Building B4/002 
L-2920 Luxembourg 
THE PRESENT: LINGUISTIC RESEARCH 
AND ENGINEERING 
The Linguistic Research and Engineering (LRE) programme 
was launched in 1992 with the aims of (a) preparing a more 
substantial follow-up action in language engineering and 
(h)prototyping an RTD scheme for language processing 
characterized by a substantial involvement of the private sector. 
The actions covered by LRE include application projects, 
language resources and tools, standardization, assessment and 
evaluation, and applied research, for a total of 26 projects. A 
number of accompanying measures have also been put in 
motion. Work started in late 1992 and first results are expected 
in early 1995. 
A substantial part of the LRE funds are devoted to application 
projects ranging from full text retrieval through message 
extraction, categorization and routing, software localization, 
foreign language reading aids, to automated translation of 
simplified texts and support tools for human translation. 
LRE actions on language resources include methods and tools 
for corpora, lexica and terminology collections. The 
development of a common software platform, ALEP, is currently 
reaching beta its testing phase. 
In order to favor the reuse of expensive language resources, 
LRE is promoting through the EAC~LES group consensus building 
amongst major European projects on a common resource 
encoding scheme. 
Other action concern funding of industrial interest groups, 
namely in the area of controlled languages (e.g. for product and 
maintenance documentation) and full text retrieval. 
Finally, two small-scale international collaboration projects 
are currently being supported by LRE, namely a state-of-the-art 
survey in Natural Language Processing and Speech in 
collaboration with the National Science Foundation and a 
project on multi-lingual corpora. 
THE FUTURE: LANGUAGE 
ENGINEERING 
The Language Engineering (LE) programme will be more 
important than LRE and give a major new focus to initiatives in 
the area of natural language processing, speech technology, and 
machine translation, previously dispersed over different 
programmes. 
Pilot application projects will be the major means for 
stimulating collaboration between users, suppliers and 
researchers. Building on the successful LRE scheme, these 
projects will provide a more user-centered context and 
encourage a coordinated and market-driven approach to RTD 
tasks, and at the same time demonstrate and validate the 
integration of language components within information and 
communications systems and services. 
While substantial resources will be devoted to selected short- to 
medium-term objectives, support will be provided for longer- 
term endeavors, leading to more advanced and effective 
technologies. 
The focus of the LE programme will also be on application 
projects aiming at providing pilot systems and services 
covering areas relating to advanced document creation, 
translation and management, interactive information services, 
inter-personal communication and language acquisition and use. 
Support actions will be carried on in the area of language 
resources such as corpora, lexica and terminology, software 
tools, and general research focused on the integration of Natural 
Language and Speech processing. 
Continued support for standardization and validation actions 
will be ensured, and include assessment, evaluation and bench 
marking. 
Finally, accompanying measures will cover valorization and 
dissemination of R&D work, training, support for user and 
industrial interest groups, and international collaboration. 
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