Preface

Language is one of the premises for the development of communication, education and all kinds of individual abilities, that is exactly those objectives considered to be the vital factors of future competitiveness in Europe, a geo-political, economic and social area which is and must remain multilingual.
As progress in telecommunications and computers reduces distances, representing the main inhibitory factor in communication, the information technology transforms the society into a "global village". The unprecedented advances in processing speed and storage capacity of the actual computers, in the database technology, multimedia and user friendly interfaces, in the interconnectivity and tele-services etc., created a solid infrastructure for technological significant progress in automatic processing of natural languages. Besides theoretical and applied linguistics, language processing encompasses a number of inter-related disciplines within the field of information technology. They share in common the primary goal of processing both written and spoken human languages. In the context of information society, natural languages become subject to the technical/technological investigation. Language technology requires specific R&D methodologies, conformance with the "de facto" existing standards on language resources encoding.
Language processing ranges from such familiar technologies as word processing and text storage and retrieval to more ambitious pursuits as automatic translation, speech recognition and handwriting recognition. These technologies vary in complexity and are therefore in different stages of advancement and commercial exploitation.
In addition to the complexity issue, there is also another dimension to language processing, that of language informatisation. If only one language would be used by all inhabitants of the "global village", the communication problem were simpler. Since this is not possible and even not desirable, the "global village" is still fragmented due to communication and understanding barriers introduced by the large variety languages: more than 5100 natural languages are spoken all over the world.
Considering the "level of informatisation" of the several languages spoken nowadays in Europe or in any other part of the world, among these languages there are very large disparities. Because of the size of the English-speaking market and the leadership of many American companies in the information technology world, language processing is generally more advanced for the English language than for the other languages, although this is slowly changing. The European Union is committed to support a balanced development of the language technology in all European countries. This is part of a larger politically supported plan aiming at Europe globalization through information technology. In the electronic era, for a language survival, it is essential to be used in the electronic information systems.
Information and communication systems with advanced language processing capabilities have the potential to invigorate European industry by making it more productive and efficient, and thereby more competitive. In the long run, it will also help generate jobs. As perhaps the world's largest user of language technology, the Commission itself has a vested interest in encouraging this technology.
The European Commission is conscious of the global strategic importance of natural language communication and information management for the competitiveness of business, industries and administration. In order to provide for an optimal environment in this complex area, a specific research and development program has been adopted in the field of language technology, with the objective to enhance and ease human communication by exploiting information and language technology (spoken and written) and thereby supporting socio-economic developments whilst maintaining the diversity of languages and cultures in Europe.