Language, once a cultural asset in Europe, has become an economic commodity. The national language institutes now have the task of providing the means for making knowledge available in the national language and distributing locally produced information worldwide. This includes not only training more translators, but also developing the necessary…

An obstacle in Natural Language understanding is the existence of lexical gaps, i.e. words or word senses that are not in the lexicon of the system. This thesis describes the implementation of MURRAY, a learning mechanism which infers the properties of a new lexical item from its syntactical environment and infers its meaning based on context and…

This paper discusses inclusion of the Russian language in European language resource development. It is suggested that European initiatives to develop language resources can not afford to ignore Russian, and that there is much work to do to resolve differences in resources on the two sides of the former Iron Curtain. A 1995 project, undertaken by…

CORDON is a computerized system for tracing and documenting changes in the use and frequency of word forms within textual language corpora. In its new form currently under development, CORDON will address the emergence of neologisms, both new words and new terminology within special areas (generally new uses of existing words). The system detects…

Humor, a reversible, string-based unification approach for lemmatizing and disambiguating language data, has been used for both language corpus analysis and creation of a variety of linguistic software applications such as spell-checking. The system is language-independent, allowing multilingual applications for a variety of language types. Its…

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…

Presents Catalan as a substantial culture and looks at the present social situation of the Catalan language. Topics addressed include legal provisions; the educational system; the influence of mass media and information technology, including computer technology and applied linguistics; the audiovisual field; second-language learning; and future…

This proceedings contains papers from the first European seminar of the Trans-European Language Resources Infrastructure (TELRI) include: "Cooperation with Central and Eastern Europe in Language Engineering" (Poul Andersen); "Language Technology and Language Resources in China" (Feng Zhiwei); "Public Domain Generic Tools:…