SILT's major
activities are:
- carefully surveying the field to identify the
resources, tools, and frameworks in order to examine what
exists and what needs to be developed, and to identify
those areas for which interoperability would have the
broadest impact in advancing research and development and
significant applications dependent on them;
- identifying the major efforts on standards
development and interoperable system design together with
existing and developing technologies, and examining ways
to leverage their results to define an interoperablity
infrastructure for both tools and data;
- analyzing innovative methods and techniques for the
creation and maintenance of language resources in order
to reduce the high costs, increase productivity, and
enable rapid development of resources for languages that
currently lack them;
- implementing proposed annotation standards and best
practices in corpora currently under development (e.g.,
American National Corpus, TimeBank) to evaluate their viability
and feed into the process of further standards
development, testing, and use of interoperability
frameworks (e.g., GATE, UIMA) and implementation of processing
modules, and distributing all software, data, and
annotations.
- ensuring the broadest possible community engagement
in the development of consensus and agreement on
strategies, priorities, and best approaches for achieving
broad interoperability by means of sessions, open
meetings, and special workshops at major conferences in
the field, together with active maintenance of and
involvement in open web forums and Wikis;
- providing the technical expertise necessary to turn
consensus and agreement into robust interoperability
frameworks along with the appropriate tools and resources
for their broad use and implementation by means of
tutorials and training workshops, especially for
undergraduate and graduate students in the field.
