The UNL Initiative: An Overview

Proceedings of the 21st international conference companion on World Wide Web - WWW '12 Companion, 2012

We report on the MultilingualWeb initiative, a collaboration between the W3C Internationalization Activity and the European Commission, realized as a series of EC-funded projects. We review the outcomes of "MultilingualWeb", which conducted 4 workshops analyzing "gaps" within Web standardization that currently hinder multilinguality. Gap analysis led to formation of "MultilingualWeb-LT" -project and W3C Working Group with cross industry representation that will address priority issues via standardization of interoperability metadata.

Intercultural …, 2007

The Internet has already connected people and established a mature online community. The use of WWW is also in the main stream of disseminating one's information and services. In the present information borderless society, we still need a lot of fundamental tools as well as the standard reference resources to facilitate our daily communications across the languages and cultures for better understanding or smoothing the communications. To develop such fundamental linguistic tools, we need to put efforts in cross language study and multilingual resource development. Online collaborative works are efficiently conducted among expert groups via many existing services such as Sourceforge, Wiki or Weblog. Each has already gained its user potential in several online communities. However, in the process of multilingual resource development and intercultural communication we still need to fulfill the requirements in well-structured design of the database, communication tools that provide necessary linkages between records of intention to particular assertions, and functions to realize selectional preference in case that there are more than one assertion. In this paper, we propose a new platform, called Knowledge Unifying Initiator (KUI), for building an online community for a particular purpose corresponding to the activities in human's thinking process: starting from issuing a topic of interest which can be branched into localization, polling and publichearing corresponding to the maturity of the proposal. We conducted a study on multilingual medical text collaborative translation and the initiative in Asian WordNet development to evaluate our proposed platform.

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2012

The usage of Internet has grown exponentially over the last two decades. The number of Internet users has grown from 16 Million to 1650 Million from 1995 to 2010. It has become a major repository of information catering almost every area. Since the Internet has its origin in USA which is English speaking country there is huge dominance of English on the World Wide Web. Although English is a globally acceptable language, still there is a huge population in the world which is not able to access the Internet due to language constraints. It has been estimated that only 20-25% of the world population speaks English as a native language. More and more people are accessing the Internet nowadays removing the cultural and linguistic barriers and hence there is a high growth in the number of non-English speaking users over the last few years on the Internet. Although many solutions have been provided to remove the linguistic barriers, still there is a huge gap to be filled. This paper attempts to analyze the need of information availability in different languages and the various technological constraints related to multi-linguism on the Internet.

Thematic meeting for the world summit on the …, 2005

The kaleidoscope shows a diversity of colors and patterns. The world is full of bio-diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity and so on. On the trail of the industrial revolution emerges a new knowledge based society. Superior technologies become available to add to speed, productivity and quality. Issues of affordability, availability, and access to them haunt the nations, which trail behind. ICT, as an enabling technology, brings hope. Improved ICTs appear rapidly with lower price, higher performance and smaller in size. This has fueled the process of transforming diversity into polarity -digital divide -that is sprawling and threatening to be a menace to all. "IT for masses" is the new recipe to arrest the digital divide. Increase in PC penetration and Internet users is often considered a sign of bridging digital divide. But knowledge divide will persist unless the efficacy level of ICT utilization improves. ICT efficacy will depend on ease in handling ICT appliances in local language and communicating seamlessly with other communities. This may necessitate shift in focus from "Bridging Digital Divide" to "Digital Unite and Knowledge for all", and also from "being Consumers" to "becoming Creators". The prevailing Localisation efforts are top-down -influenced by western culture and ethos; global icons suppress local contents. But Localisation must be bottom-up: local-to-global, must handle locale-specific issues, must use reusable components, must look for new markets and cost models. Developing nations should not remain mere recipient of contents localized by others; they must become localizers; and make their content accessible to all. Middleware technology helps in rapidly changing technology environment with a variety of applications. Steps need be taken to localise middleware. Unicode, for instance, emerges with consistent character encoding scheme for living languages of the world. Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval will facilitate access to multilingual information resources. Universal access will depend on affordability of ICT appliances. We detail the multilingual scenario of India, with relevant references to language policies and local language computing initiatives in other Asian countries.

ACM SIGIR Forum, 2009

Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) is at a turning point wherein substantial real-world applications are being introduced after fifteen years of research into cross-language information retrieval, question answering, statistical machine translation and named entity recognition.

Proceedings of the Third …

Preface ITMAS 2012 follows the success of its predecessors ITMAS 2010 and ITMAS 2011. ITMAS 2010 and ITMAS 2011 were held in conjunction with AAMAS 2010 in Toronto (Canada) and Taipei (Taiwan) respectively. ITMAS 2012 is to be held standalone this time in Valencia (Spain). This year we had 17 submissions from which 13 were finally accepted. This clearly confirms the growing interest in the workshop as well as its relevance for the whole comunity working on infrastructures and tools for Multi-agent Systems.

2000

This paper presents an interlingua approach to the machine translation of lengthy documents. This appr oach is based on encoding the source text in the form of universa l semantic networks, using the Universal Networking Language, UNL interlingua, which can then be decoded back into any natural language. This UNL technology has been applied to 1000 pages from the Encyclopedia

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2006

: "Multilingualism and the Web", in: Nicolás, Carlota / Moneglia, Massimo (eds.): La gestione unitaria dell'eredità culturale multilingue europea e la sua diffusione in rete. Atti della conferenza internazionale CLiP Abstract: Only a few years ago, the new technologies in general and the web in particular seemed to constitute a danger for most languages of the world. In the meantime, however, it would seem that quite the opposite is the case and that the new technologies favor multilingualism, the deconstruction of norms and of linguistic institutions, and the formation of hybrid languages. In fact, not only has the web itself become a multilingual environment but also minority languages and local dialects are migrating into this digital space. Furthermore, the (intentional) development of mixed languages even in environments dominated by writing would seem an indication of the weakening of the national and standard language paradigm, of the search for a we-code counterbalancing institutionalised they-codes and for a linguistic identity built on the multilingual knowledge of the speakers. In this contribution I arrive at the conclusion that the process from monolingualism to multilingualism and to hybridity as an important ingredient of digital culture a) presents linguistics with a unique possibility to study directly how the 'oral' is being transformed into the 'written', how norms evolve and spread, and from which tools depends the recognition of languages or dialects as modern communication systems, b) questions those schools of linguistics which have modelled language as a homogeneous entity, the ideal speaker-listener's competence as inherently monolingual, and have reduced linguistic variety to a common core, and c) constitutes a serious challenge for Humanities Computing and the developers of language technologies which, if taken up, will open up, finally, this new domain of research to the many Creoles and mixed languages spoken (and written) in the world.