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<Paper uid="W05-0108">
  <Title>Language Technology from a European Perspective</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="43" end_page="45" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Overall aims of the project
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The overall aim of the project is to export the common educational experience currently embodied within existing Masters programs of the consortium to scholars and students of non-EU countries.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This aim will be realized by several different classes of activity under the rubrics of (i) workshops (ii) distance learning tools and (iii) coordination of a common Master program. We discuss these in the following sections.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="43" end_page="44" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.1 Workshops
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> One of the most important types of activities of the project is organizing workshops and courses both for students from non-EU countries and for their teachers. The effect of these events is at least twofold - the students from countries or regions which do not have an access to any higher degree education in LCT get a chance to broaden their perspective by listening to lectures of prominent scientists and lecturers. The courses will also help the consortium to establish better contacts with non-EU Universities, teachers, and students which will turn out to be invaluable when disseminating the common European Master program in Language Technology discussed further below.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Both UFAL and CoLi have a long tradition in respect of offering such courses to students from the broadest possible range of countries.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> UFAL has devoted a huge effort in the past to raise funding for the organization, once or twice a year, of a series of lectures by prominent scientists and lecturers from all over the world. This series of lectures, the Vilem Mathesius courses [6], have become well-known, especially among the Central  and East European students of computational and general linguistics.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> This year's course, held in March under the auspices of LATER, was able to support the attendance of 50 students from Russia, Ukraine, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Georgia to lectures by prominent individuals including two ACL award winners.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> At CoLi, the Computational Linguistics Colloquium is also a traditional event attracting the attention of both well-known lecturers and a number of master and postgraduate students from various countries. A second series of lectures in the frame of our project was held at the University of Saarlandes in Saarbruecken in January.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> A third event, organized by the CBS, will take place in June. The first day consists of information seminar on content management and language technology to promote CBS' newly-launched International Master of Language Administration, whilst the second will be devoted to diffusion of a various issues connected to the Erasmus Mundus course.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> Finally, a fourth event, in the form of a workshop with invited guest lecturers, is being organized at the University of Malta that will take place in September 2005. The theme of the workshop will be Machine Translation which is currently very topical given the newly-achieved official European status that the local language now enjoys.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="44" end_page="44" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.2 Coordination of Masters Programs
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> A second important aim of the LATER project is the definition, coordination and implementation of an integrated European Masters Programme in LCT by creating a common basis that will appeal to both European and non-EU students.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> The rationale behind the creation of such a programme is the assumption that LCT now occupies a central position in research and education in Europe, being a key enabling technology for numerous applications related to the information society, although the shortage of qualified researchers and developers is slowing down the speed of innovation in Europe.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The proposed programme addresses this shortage by creating a directed education and training opportunity for the next generation of LCT innovators in that will in turn bring educational, social and economic benefits. Some specific aims of Erasmus Mundus are also addressed: European education in LCT will be promoted worldwide and its competitiveness increased, increasing at the same time the competitiveness of European IT industries, creating a multilingual information society that is accessible for all, and turning the ``information overload'' into a wealth of accessible and useful knowledge.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="44" end_page="45" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.3 Distance learning tools
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> A third aim of LATER is the development of effective methods of hosting and integrating non-EU students, for example by developing distance learning tools and joint distance education modules, in order to facilitate outreach by online dissemination of courses. An example of such modules, as well as for computer-based tools, is being developed on the basis of the virtual courses CoLi has developed in the last 3 years in the framework of the MiLCA project (Medienintensive Lehrmodule in der Computerlinguistik-Ausbildung</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> We also plan to explore the use of collaboration technologies based on Sitescape [16], that have been developed at CBS for academic collaboration, for the management of certain aspects of the proposed Masters programme.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> The fruits of various initiatives already under way at UoM will be exploited and extended during the life of the proposed course. These include interactive web based course delivery [13], just-intime support based on P2P architectures [14], XML-based frameworks for online courses [15], the latter being developed within as a part of the  Whilst many agree with the above assessment of the importance of LCT, they disagree on the definition of &amp;quot;integrated course&amp;quot;. Fortunately, we can turn to the comprehensive definition supplied by the EU call, the central element of which is &amp;quot;a jointly developed curriculum or full recognition by the consortium of modules which are developed  for more see http://milca.sfs.unituebingen.de/index.html. null  and delivered separately, but make up a common standard Masters course.&amp;quot; Again, some turn away in horror at the notion of a standard curriculum in this area, the claim being that there is already enough standardization in the world, so why add to it? The point is, any programme dealing with LCT has to address the fact that it is highly interdisciplinary, including, at the core, computer science, computational and theoretical linguistics, and mathematics, and at the periphery, a wide variety of other subjects including electrical engineering, psychology, cognitive science artificial intelligence etc.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> With such a large number of disciplines involved, it is practically impossible for a single University to excel in all of them. However if more than one University is involved, various kinds of curriculum sharing can be envisaged and so a much higher level of coverage becomes entirely achievable.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> Put another way, curriculum sharing, together with common admission and assessment procedures envisaged, allows delivery of a complex course to be handled by what is effectively a &amp;quot;superuniversity&amp;quot;. null</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="4" start_page="45" end_page="45" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.1 Integration in practice
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> To put this idea into practice we are proposing that students will get the chance to attend a two years' master program at two universities chosen from a larger consortium, which is currently being put together. It includes the four original partners of the LATER project and the following new partners: University of Amsterdam (UvA) in the Netherlands, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen (FUB) in Italy, the Universities of Nancy 1 and Nancy 2 in France, Roskilde University in Denmark and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Studying in multi-national groups at two universities in Europe, with English as instruction language, accompanied by language classes in another European language, will contribute to the students' preparation for the increasing globalization of science, commerce and industry. The course also will also prepare students for follow-up Ph.D. studies provided by the participating partners and others.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The proposed programme follows the Bologna model for higher education in Europe and comprises 120 ECTS  credits, 30 of which make up the Masters dissertation, and 90 of which are coursework credits structured as follows:  Coursework is distributed over three semesters, while the dissertation is supposed to be completed in the fourth semester It is important to underline that this structure permits a considerable degree of variation. First, a module might be &amp;quot;implemented&amp;quot; by different set of courses at different Universities. Secondly, the advanced modules are electives, based on the specific strengths in research and teaching of individual partner institutions. There is no requirement that the advanced modules offered by different Universities should coincide.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> Let us now introduce individual modules in more detail. Parentheses indicate ECTS credits.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4">  previous text, the integration of existing master programmes is done exclusively pair-wise. The students can't study at three universities (although the rules of the Erasmus Mundus programme allow such triangular cooperation). The restrictions within our consortia go even further - the students do not have a free choice of a combination of any two universities from within the consortium, they must choose one of the pairs offered by the consortium. null The reason for such a restriction is pretty simple - it turned out that although all members of the consortia in principle provide education both in Computer Science and in Computational Linguistics, they differ in the balance between these two fields. Within the consortium, there are universities with a strong stress on a Computer Science courses, aiming at a complex education including the sound theoretical background in the field, while other universities offer a more practically oriented educational scheme, stressing the concepts attracting a wider audience, e.g. various types of web technologies, databases, data mining etc.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> As a result of this, each university participates in an average of four bilateral partnerships. We think that the fact that the consortium consists of universities which are not identical greatly increases the variety of options available. They have a chance to choose those universities which are best suited to their preferences whether these are in terms of sub-ject area emphasis or geographical region.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> The preparation of the integrated Master programme doesn't stop at matching the universities and lectures offered. Erasmus Mundus is not just a cooperation, it is really a completely new scheme which must also address practical issues as grades, examination procedures, admission procedure, tuition fees, defense of the thesis, local specialties existing at some partner universities etc.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="7"> The proposed Masters programme is something new. It is the first attempt to create a comprehensive Masters degree in this subject area that conforms to all the legalistic requirements of each participating University. Students completing the course will possess a Masters degree delivered by two of the participant Universities. This is in contrast to the existing European Master in Language and Speech [11], which is implemented through a certification procedure that does not replace any legal degree that a student may obtain from a University. null</Paragraph>
    </Section>
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