Cooperation with Central and Eastern Europe in Language Engineering.

This paper outlines trends and activities in Central and Eastern European language research and language-related software development (language engineering) and briefly describes some specific projects. The language engineering segment of the European Union's Fourth Framework Programme, intended to facilitate use of telematics applications and increase options for communication within and between European language through language processing methods, is sketched, focusing on proposals for research funding. Ten joint research projects, involving partners from at least three countries in Eastern and Western Europe, are then described. These projects address: creation of a pronunciation lexicon for the European Union, with city and town names, street names, family names, and product names in 11 languages; creation of large speech data collections for Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian; software standardization and analytical tool and corpus development for Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovenian; compilation of terminologies in four areas (economics/management, energy, environment, telecommunications); extension of the generic computerized dictionary model; construction of morphological dictionary software; bilingual electronic dictionaries and intelligent text alignment; creation of modular courseware for English-as-a-Second-Language instruction; application of natural language processing techniques to technology for computer-assisted language learning; and development of a multilingual, multifunctional information retrieval system. (MSE) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ********************************************************************************