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The overall objective of HLT is to support e-business in a global
context and to promote a human centred infostructure ensuring equal access
and usage opportunities for all. This is to be achieved by developing
multilingual technologies and demonstrating exemplary applications
providing features and functions that are critical for the realisation of
a truly user friendly Information Society. Projects address generic and
applied RTD from a multi- and cross-lingual perspective, and undertake to
demonstrate how language specific solutions can be transferred to and
adapted for other languages.
While elements of the three initial HLT action lines - Multilinguality,
Natural Interactivity and Crosslingual Information Management are still
present, there has been periodic re-assessment and tuning of them to
emerging trends and changes in the surrounding economic, social, and
technological environment. The trials and best practice in multilingual
e-service and e-commerce action line was introduced in the IST 2000 work
programme (IST2000) to stimulate new forms of partnership between
technology providers, system integrators and users through trials and best
practice actions addressing end-to-end multi-language platforms and
solutions for e-service and e-commerce. The fifth IST call for proposals covered this
action line.
HLT features in three action lines of the IST 2001 work programme. The
Multilingual
Web action line is a refocused version of the IST2000 crosslingual
information management action line programme and is geared towards
multilingual web content, translation and cross-media delivery.
The Natural
and multilingual interactivity action line results from a merger and
consolidation of the multilinguality and natural interactivity action
lines in IST2000 and is geared towards intelligent information appliances
and advanced communication services. It is covered in the sixth IST call for
proposals.
The Key
Action III specific support measures action line is a refocused
version of the previous action line - working groups, and dissemination
and awareness actions - in IST2000.
IST2001 - III.3.1 Multilingual Web
Objectives: To advance towards a fuller realisation of the
multilingual Internet for personal development and informational purposes,
and for distributed enterprise knowledge management across languages and
delivery platforms.
Focus: Wider availability and more
effective production and use of multilingual information over fixed and
mobile digital networks. RTD work will address both integrative showcases
and longer-term research endeavours with identifiable short term spin
offs, and will encompass three intertwined project lines:
- Collaborative multi-language design, authoring and publishing of
online (Web) multimedia documents, including controlled language
techniques and cross-lingual terminology support, and the associated
need to preserve quality and consistency across parallel language
versions through integrated workflow, quality control and update
management tools;
- Automated translation of written and spoken language, multilingual
generation and cross-lingual gathering and abstracting of online (Web)
content, including customised solutions for vertical markets, corporate
intranets, and e-Commerce applications;
- Adaptative information delivery through multi-channel services
(text, speech, multimodal content and input-output) together with the
associated information selection, conversion and rendering according to
user preferences (from gisting through summarisation to full
translation) and the capabilities of the access point (e.g. Internet PC
browser, GPRS/UMTS micro-browser, fixed or mobile telephone).
Support will be provided for multilingual annotated language resources
underpinning the above RTD lines, including methods and tools for
automated extraction and labelling from existing data repositories,
insofar as they provide a clear path towards industrially relevant
applications or can greatly enhance the linguistic breadth and depth of
existing systems and technologies.
Types of actions addressed: Research and Development,
Demonstration, Combined projects
IST2001 - III.3.2 Natural and multilingual
interactivity
Objectives: To progress towards a more intuitive interaction
with, and effective use of intelligent network services and appliances.
RTD will address both relatively short term applicative showcases and
longer term research efforts aimed at robust dialogue and unconstrained
speech/language understanding. The intended orientation towards middleware
and embedded technologies presupposes significant advances of the
component technologies and further progress towards their integration
within mass market products and services.
Focus: RTD will
focus on the intersection of multilingual input/output with speech-,
language- and multimodal interaction and technology mediated
communication, and address service issues such as performance, reliability
and scalability of embedded speech and language technologies. RTD work
will encompass:
- At home: interaction with network enabled information and
entertainment appliances, and command and control of complex home
services and appliances, including reliable speech recognition and high
quality synthesis in demanding environments and for user groups with
special needs (e.g. children and non-native speakers)
- At work: technology assisted interpersonal and group communication,
including virtual meetings and multilingual dialogues e.g. for
conversational customer support services.
- On the move: interaction with and control of personal information
and communication appliances, including next-generation mobiles and
digital assistants, on-board devices and in-vehicle services.
Types of actions addressed: Research and Development,
Demonstration, Combined projects
IST2001 - III.5.3 Key Action III specific support
measures
- Surveying the state of the art in the fields addressed by the Key
Action, including technology foresight and market watch. This can be
combined with benchmarking of research results and progress towards
strategic goals, based on a (small) set of performance indicators
measuring quality, effectiveness and impact along technical, economic
and social dimensions. The work also covers surveys of the position of
European research in this area with respect to similar efforts carried
out under national or industrial projects or in competitor countries.
- Identification, documentation and dissemination of knowhow, in the
design, implementation and use of systems, tools and methods addressed
by the Key Action. Projects will actively seek out results emerging from
user trials (EU funded or otherwise), analyse strengths and weaknesses,
disseminate conclusions and foster their deployment in other European
programmes, national or regional initiatives including those supported
by Structural Funds. In the case of de facto standards, emphasis will be
on channelling them through relevant international and professional
bodies.
- Evaluation of advanced multimedia products and applications through
open competitions and/or award schemes, with a view to establishing
excellence in a variety of categories, based on innovation, creativity
and other criteria. This action is expected to give rise to highly
visible showcases, for exemplification and illustration.
All
research activities and outcomes are to be published using print and
electronic media and disseminated through a variety of channels at
project, cluster and programme level, and promoted at relevant
conferences and trade shows, where appropriate through dedicated
actions.
Types of actions addressed: Accompanying Measures (excluding
Take-up).
IST2000 Action Line Descriptions
III.3.1 Natural interactivity
Objectives: To enhance the naturalness of interaction between
humans and digital services and devices, the ease of use of computer
systems in non-expert environments, and the richness and effectiveness of
technology-mediated interpersonal communication.
Focus:
Achieving a fuller integration of the speech and language processing
communities with other related research communities, thus providing a path
for multi-disciplinary collaborations. RTD will be geared towards
unrestricted speech and language input-output, multi-modal dialogues,
keyboard-less operation, and understanding of messages and communicative
acts. Work will encompass:
- Enabling research and technologies aimed at enhancing the
naturalness of conversational interfaces through the integration of
multiple modalities, in particular by coupling robust speech recognition
and language understanding techniques with facial expression and gesture
recognition and rendering, and considering anticipatory characteristics
of dialogues.
- Applied research and integrative showcases addressing human-computer
interaction making use of multiple cognitive features and communicative
acts, for interpersonal communication and interaction with virtual
worlds, synthetic personae and multimedia systems.
III.3.2 Cross-lingual information management and
knowledge discovery
Objectives: To empower people confronted with large quantities
of digital information and to support them in knowledge intensive tasks,
by exploiting the linguistic knowledge embodied in documents, messages,
dialogues and audio-visual objects.
Focus: More intuitive
and effective use and assimilation of information content through RTD
addressing intelligent agents applying language-processing models and
techniques for:
- Cross-lingual information retrieval and categorisation; information
ranking and profiling according to pre-set and dynamically adjustable
relevance criteria; topic identification and summarisation, both within
and across documents;
- Deep semantic information analysis, knowledge detection and
extraction, including entity recognition and fact extraction, and name
and event correlation.
The information may be either structured (e.g. published text) or
unstructured (e.g. e-mail, transcriptions of speeches) and is expected to
exhibit a combination of text, speech and multimedia features.
RTD will
address both applications-oriented showcases and longer-term research
challenges, and is expected to build on and interact with concurrent
developments at national and international level.
III.3.3 Multilingual communication services and
appliances
Objectives: To make interaction with fixed and mobile
communication services and appliances possible independently from the
language of the user, and to progress towards a wider provision of
multilingual capabilities within the universal infostructure underpinning
the Information Society.
Focus: RTD will concentrate on the development and validation of
robust methods and components for multilingual interpersonal and group
communication, e.g. within multi-channel messaging and conferencing
systems, including:
- Adaptive multilingual interfaces to personal appliances and consumer
devices, including e.g. mobiles, palm-tops, on-board devices and
set-tops;
- Cross-modal information selection, conversion and rendering (text,
speech, multimedia) according to the capabilities of the access point;
and will address service issues such as robustness and real-time
performance of embedded language technologies, their scalability and
portability across languages and technical platforms, and
hardware/software integration within the hosting system.
III.3.4 Trials and best practice in multilingual
e-service and e-commerce
Objectives: To stimulate new forms of partnership between
technology providers, system integrators and users through trials and best
practice actions addressing end-to-end multi-language platforms and
solutions for e-service and e-commerce.
Focus: Demonstrating and assessing the impact of innovative
approaches (e.g. provision of multilingual and multi-cultural on-line
content, Web enabled call centres and multi-access portals, multilingual
transactions and customer-relationship management, etc.) on business
patterns and capabilities, and customer behaviour and acceptance.
III.5.1 Working groups, and dissemination and
awareness actions
Working groups for the stimulation and consolidation of standards and
best practice work both at European and global level, in both formal and
informal forums and involving national bodies, in the following areas:
- Audio-visual content production and electronic publishing
application areas (e.g. knowledge and lifestyle publishing, geographic
information).
- Virtual representation and preservation of cultural and scientific
objects, including relevant policy issues (e.g. copyright, service
models).
- Learning technologies, e.g. open learning architectures, metadata,
standard interfaces, models and best practice relating to reusable
learning objects, potentially contributing to IEEE P1484 and CEN/ISSS
workshop on learning standards.
- Industry-led work in the human language technologies area addressing
end-to-end and system-level interworking of heterogeneous components;
open reference architectures and development environments, including
service/application configuration platforms; interoperability and reuse
of linguistic data, including automated techniques for extracting
application and task specific information from experimental data.
- Media representation and cross-media content interchange, especially
for streamed digital audio and visual content, e.g. digital video
objects and sequences.
- Information retrieval, metadata, intelligent agents.
Dissemination and awareness actions to cover:
- Measures aimed at a wider exposure of and user access to
leading-edge technologies and innovative solutions, through virtual
exhibitions and showcases, covering emerging results from previous and
ongoing RTD efforts.
- Establishment of focal points in support of national and
international communities of human-language technologies researchers,
developers and users, with a view to fostering new partnerships and
speeding up the deployment of research results.
The following table shows how HLT R&D projects from the first 3 IST
calls map to the broad HLT action lines - multilinguality, natural
interactivity, cross-lingual information management and support &
accompanying measures.
|
Project |
Multilinguality |
Natural Interactivity |
Crosslingual Information Management |
Support &
Accompanying
Measures |
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For additional information on the genesis and scope
of HLT in the IST Programme follow the link. |
Version for printing