At the Assoc for Computational Linguistics conference last week in Madrid
(you thought NATO was the only thing happening there then? No indeed --
Madrid is a very vibrant kind of place!) I attended a workshop on Ontologies,
and described our plans wrt an Ontology Standard.
This raised considerable interest. The most concrete was from the reviewer of
the EAGLES and related efforts, an EC-funded multinational project to create
the standards in which a future ontology can be placed. Groups in Sheffield,
Pisa, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and more recently also in Germany and France have
been funded to:
- create WordNets of Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, German
- create a specification of the structure and content of a standard ontology.
I am in the process of exchanging letters of cooperation with this reviewer,
Prof. Antonio Zampolli of the University of Pisa (a rather senior person in
Computational Linguistics and Lexical Databases). He and the EC funding
agent, Mr. Nino Cencioni of Brussels, will visit the NSF in October to
discuss possible international collaboration and to try to drum up some
funding to hold two workshops, one in Europe and one here, on these matters.
With the blessing of the Ontology Group I will be happy to join their meeting
and try to describe our goals and work. (I am also doing so at a meeting in
Washington at NIST later this month.)
Your comments appreciated.
E
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Eduard Hovy
email: hovy@isi.edu USC Information Sciences Institute
tel: 310-822-1511 ext 731 4676 Admiralty Way
fax: 310-823-6714 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
project homepage: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html