New Language Engineering Programme for Italy
by Fedrico Flaviano
An important conference hosted in mid-January by the Italian Ministry
for the Post and Telecommunications on 'Natural Language Processing in
the Information Society' provided the platform for the launching of a proposal
for a national language engineering programme.
The meeting was opened by the Minister, Antonio Maccanico, who outlined
the main objectives of the Conference. In particular Professor Maccanico
evidenced the threat currently being posed to national languages by the
globalising effect of the information society and the predominant role
played by the English language. He stressed the need to safeguard the communicative
value of Italian by providing an adequate infrastructure for Italian linguistic
resources.
Theoretical studies on written and spoken language, and practical applications
such as speech recognition, speech transcription and voice synthesis, machine
translation, computer-assisted language teaching, content-based information
retrieval, document authoring, WWW applications, and so on, necessitate
a number of different kinds of linguistic and lexical resources. On the
threshold of the year 2000 and with the perspective of an increasingly
powerful information society, the acquisition of such resources cannot
be neglected without risking the decline of a language and with it of the
related culture.
The importance of language processing technologies cannot be ignored.
They make it possible to break down many of the existing barriers between
the citizen and the information society. For example, they can be used
to:
- provide facilities for the automatic translation into Italian of texts
in other languages (eg downloaded from Internet)
- facilitate access and searching of information in large electronic
archives, such as digital libraries
- set up distributed multimedia bureaux which, using speech recognition
and voice synthesis techniques, can offer all kinds of information or commercial
services through man/machine dialogues
- supply automatic information services through the telecommunications
networks, such as railway timetable consultation, latest stock market prices,
etc.
A proposal for a national programme for the development of language
engineering (LE) technologies and linguistic resources was thus presented
at the Conference. The main aim of the programme is to bring Italy into
line with the other G7 countries by encouraging the development of research
in natural language processing and, at the same time, to promote the merits
of the Italian language and culture.
This proposal has been studied by a group of experts formed by representatives
from the Ministry, from the academic and research communities, from professional
associations for translators and interpreters and from language industries
and services, coordinated by Antonio Zampolli, Director of the Institute
for Computational Linguistics, CNR, Pisa.
The starting point was a survey of already existing Italian linguistic
resources, and in particular those that have been created thanks to contributions
from the European Union. These large collections of mono- and multilingual
text and speech data banks, of computational grammars and lexicons1, and
of software procedures form the necessary framework for the development
of products and technologies for language engineering in Italy. A plan
of activities for the further development of these resources and the creation
of the necessary infrastructures was outlined.
The Conference provided an excellent forum for the discussion of this
plan and, in particular, to stimulate the participation of the industrial
and financial worlds in its activation. It also offered an impressive panorama
of the intense interest of Italian industries, service providers and public
authorities in the potential benefits of LE applications for many Italian
industrial, commercial, social and cultural activities.
There was general consensus on the need to reduce the differences in
terms of infrastructures between the linguistic resources available for
Italian and for the other G7 languages. Not only Italy but the entire European
community will benefit from efforts made to promote the Italian language;
the valuable heritage provided by language and cultural differences in
Europe will bring competitive advantages to the entire system in the global
market place.
Please contact:
Federico Flaviano Ministero delle Poste delle Telecomunicazioni
Tel: +39 6 5958 2879
E-mail: f.flaviano@flashnet.it
