ERCIM News No.37 - April 1999

Presenting Swedish Language Technology

by Björn Gambäck

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The Information and Language Engineering group at SICS is currently setting up a web-based information service for human language technology in Sweden. The aim is to present the work done in the field, both by researchers and by industry, to the Swedish public.

At the same time SICS will act as a national coordination point for the academic and industrial language processing communities, that is to channel information between the different groups working in Computational Linguistics and Speech in the country. The work on the web-site (www.svenska.sics.se) is funded by the Swedish government through NUTEK, the National Board for Industrial and Technical Development. Since the main target groups are within Sweden, the web-site will mainly be in Swedish (‘svenska’ actually means ‘Swedish’ in Swedish!); however, there will also be a part targeted at other European groups looking for Swedish research partners.

SICS has been chosen as the coordinator for this project since SICS’s language group has a long-established reputation as being one of the leading groups in the field in the country. In fact, there are already two projects at SICS with somewhat similar goals: in one project SICS is building a platform for Swedish language processing and collecting resources in the field from the various other research groups, freely distributing the results to the research community. In another project SICS is creating a digital library by collecting language technology related research material from all the Nordic countries.

The work on the information service will mainly consist of two parts: on the one hand, administrating the actual information site; and on the other, the editorial work with creating and collecting the material which will appear on it. The latter part of the work will be carried out by an editorial board consisting of representatives from several different research groups, adding both geographical and competence spread. The information content must reflect a number of research areas, and include and interest commercial partners as well as the Swedish public. Thus, no single person will be able to keep the information accurate and up to date. The role of the editor in chief will be to co-ordinate a distributed, collective effort. The editorial board will be headed by Björn Gambäck and Jussi Karlgren, both from SICS.

For further details, please see http://www.svenska.sics.se/

Please contact:

Björn Gambäck - SICS
Tel: +46 8 633 1535
E-mail: gamback@sics.se