ReTeLe: Network of Resources for Language Technologies

Language technologies (LTs) are leading technology innovation: text analytics for opinion mining and information extraction of social networks, machine translation, document classification and summarization, question answering, grammar checking, language learning and natural language user interaction, etc., require language lesources (LRs) to guarantee their availability for every language. The lack of these LRs was pointed out by the European network of excellence META-NET as the most probable cause of digital extinction of a language. ReTeLe has analyzed the current problems of LRs supply in Spain: disperse and small scale LRs production initiatives, lack of awareness by application developers and the difficulties in accessing them. Moreover, there is a pressing need of national and international recognition of the Spanish community of providers.The objective of ReTeLe is to organize activities that support communication among stakeholders in order to: (1) organize and coordinate a roadmap and research on methods to speed-up the production of open LRs in the four official languages, (2) shorten the distance with English resources so as to guarantee the availability of the required LRs for the most popular and innovative technologies; (3) guarantee and maximize the availability of these resources by publishing them in the cloud of linked open data (LOD) to make our community visible; (4) search and analyze the role of new providers of open LR, including the Spanish public administration; and (5) develop a roadmap for the development of the LR in Spain using real use cases. The roadmap will provide a unified vision, from both research and industry, on the research and innovation agenda until 2020. The expected impact is: (i) to reduce the gap between LRs in Spanish and English, (ii) to increase the amount of LRs in Basque, Catalan and Galician, and (iii) to increase the visibility of these group of researchers and LRs in European key organizations in the area.