Dan Tufis, Poul Andersen * Preface
Among the Commission's programs, the Awareness
Campaign on Language and Technology plays a leading role in the
achievement of a European coherency on the main actions that must
be taken by the member and associated states in the area of language
technology. This program aims at synergising the efforts invested
in the field of language engineering by the academic,
education, research and industry communities. The Awareness Campaign
on Language and Technology is aimed at opinion formers, media,
providers, research/academic community, users and government organisations.
Approaching these groups, and especially opinion formers, and
make them realize the benefits of undertaking a major initiative
in the Language Engineering field, and the risk of not doing it,
are some of the key subjects.
In the context of increasing political, technical
and commercial relations between the European Union and the Central
and Eastern European States, the DGXIII/E has extended its awareness
campaign activities by means of a series of itinerary National
Awareness Seminars.
The Romanian Awareness Seminar on Language and
Technology took place in Bucharest (29-31 January, 1996) under
the organisation of the Romanian Academy Center for Research in
Machine Learning, Natural Language and Conceptual Modelling, with
support from Romanian Government - Department for European Integration
- and fully funded by the European Commission. The interest of
the Romanian specialists was enormous, with more than 40 contributions
(accepted from a double number of submissions) and over 250 participants
from all the target groups envisaged by the program. The papers
presented at the Seminar were published in a volume (in Romanian)
and distributed on the Seminar registration. It was one of the
distinguished invited speakers who, considering the level of presentations,
made the proposal of having an English version of the book, allowing
thus international NLP community to learn more about the work
in Romania. The present volume contains a selection of the best
papers presented in the Seminar (and published in the Romanian
volume), but each paper was allocated more typographical space.
As more than one year has passed, some authors have updated their
contribution in order to reflect the progress made since then.
*
* *
It is beyond any doubt that the generalised informatisation
will have an extraordinary impact on the human society. Whether
this impact will be beneficial or, on the contrary, it will deepen
the actual discrepancies among the states, it all depends on the
policy makers' awareness of the necessary steps to be taken, and
on the correct evaluation of the research and development priorities.
Language technology must be included among these priorities and
given the deserved status, namely a premise for the global information
society.
The initiative and contribution of the European
Union (in its present configuration) to increasing the awareness
on language technology and to the initiation of the technologisation
of the languages in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe,
countries without which the future global information society
cannot be conceived, are beneficial, but without national programs,
supported by the governmental authorities, they remain just a
benevolent plea for survival. In order to minimize the costs of
information integration, these national programs must consider
the European trends, the standards (or "de facto" standards).
DAN TUFIS
POUL ANDERSEN
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