ALEP (Advanced Language Engineering Platform): an open architecture for language engineering

This paper provides an overview of the Advanced Language Engineering Platform (ALEP) and focuses on aspects of ALEP which give the platform a high degree of openness. ALEP is an initiative of the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), to provide the natural language research and engineering community in Europe with an open, versatile and flexible general purpose development environment ([1, 2, 3]). Natural Language Processing (NLP) related projects currently lack a widely available platform for the development of large scale, professionally designed linguistic resources and applications. As a consequence, researchers and system designers are forced to build the tools and development aids they need from scratch, before undertaking the implementation of what matters most to them; linguistic resources or applications. This situation constitutes a major bottleneck for any serious attempt to build a strong and effective European NLP industry. ALEP is a generic formal and computational environment, which can be put at the disposal of Community and national R&D projects in relevant areas, thereby avoiding duplication of effort across research projects. In recent years the need for language engineering platforms and toolkits has been more generally recognized and several primary research centres and companies are also undertaking similar initiatives.