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<Paper uid="W01-1502">
  <Title>Extending NLP Tools Repositories for the Interaction with Language Data Resources Repositories</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="1" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The main goal of the ACL/EACL01 &amp;quot;Workshop on Sharing Tools and Resources for Research and Education&amp;quot; is to discuss methods for the improvement and extension of existing repositories. In this paper we briefly address one of the central discussion point of the workshop: how to achieve a close interlinking between NLP tools and NL resources repositories. We will base this discussion on the ACL Natural Language Software Registry (see (Declerck et al., 2000)) and some papers printed in these proceedings (see the list of papers in the bibliography).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The necessity of having repositories for NLP tools has already been clearly recognized in the past, and recently this topic has also been addressed within the broader context of a conference on Language Resources (see (Chaudiron et al., 2000) and (Declerck et al., 2000)). (Chaudiron et al., 2000) is essentially concerned with the question of identifying the NLP supply according to its different uses, and thus is describing a user-oriented approach to NLP tools repositories. (Declerck et al., 2000) is mainly describing the functionalities of the new version of the ACL Natural Language Software Registry, also showing how this version can overcome some of the practical problems encountered by former repositories (a summarized presentation of the ACL Registry is given below in section 2). Both papers are also discussing the problem of proposing a good taxonomy of NLP tools: user oriented versus developer oriented, top-down versus bottom-up approach, coarse-grained versus fine-grained classification and the way those classification strategies could cooperate. So for sure there is also still a need for establishing a cooperation between distinct approaches to NLP tools classification and their implementation, and a corresponding discussion is going on.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> But since NLP tools are of interest only if they have language data they can process and transform, and Language Data Resources are only of interest if there is a clear indication on how they can be accessed and processed, there is a also a real need of establishing descriptive links between the two types of repositories in which tools on the one side and language data resources on the other side are included. This will allow people using a certain tool to easily find the type of language data they need. And the other way round: people having language data can easily find the type of tools that can produce some added-value for their data. The successful establishment of such a connection between these two types of repositories will probably require as well a partial reorganization of the NLP repositories on the one hand and the language data repositories on the other hand in order to maximally respond to the overall requirement of what at the end will be an infrastructure  for discovering, accessing and combining language related resources and tools.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This paper is specially addressing some of the extensions the ACL Registry is undergoing in order to offer a valuable contribution to this infrastructure. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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