NaCTeM

META-NET

META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to fostering the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. Language Technologies allow a number of major challenges to be overcome:

  • enabling communication and cooperation across languages,
  • securing users of any language equal access to information and knowledge,
  • building upon and advancing functionalities of networked information technology.

A concerted, substantial, continent-wide effort in language technology research and engineering is needed for realising applications that enable automatic translation, multilingual information and knowledge management and content production across all European languages. This effort will also enhance the development of intuitive language-based interfaces to technology ranging from household electronics, machinery and vehicles to computers and robots.

To this end META-NET is building the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance (META). Bringing together researchers, commercial technology providers, private and corporate language technology users, language professionals and other information society stakeholders. META will prepare the necessary ambitious joint effort towards furthering language technologies as a means towards realising the vision of a Europe united as one single digital market and information space.

META-NET is supporting the above goals by pursuing three lines of action:

  1. Fostering a dynamic and influential community around a shared vision and strategic research agenda (META-VISION)
  2. creating an open distributed facility for the sharing and exchange of resources (META-SHARE)
  3. building bridges to relevant neighbouring technology fields (META-RESEARCH).

NaCTeM will assist in these lines of action in the following ways:

  • Surveying and charting the field of language technologies in the English language
  • Mobilizing researchers, decision makers, users and providers of LT and R&D programmes in the UK for cooperation and collaboration in META.
  • Making tools at resources from NaCTeM available on the META-SHARE platform, and encourgaing others to do the same.
  • Demonstrating pilot applications via the U-Compare platform. This will showcase the power of combining tools and resources from different providers into workflows to create various types of applications, both monolingual and cross-lingual

Project team

Prinicpal Investigator: Prof. Sophia Ananiadou
Co-Investigator: Mr. John McNaught
Researcher: Mr. Paul Thompson
PhD student: Mr. Giorgos Kontonatsios

Publications

Kontonatsios, G., Korkontzelos, I., Kolluru, B. and Ananiadou, S. (In Press). Adding Text Mining Workflows as Web Services to the BioCatalogue. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Aplications and Tools for the Life Sciences (SWAT4LS).

Thompson, P., Nawaz, R., McNaught, J. and Ananiadou, S. (2011) Enriching a biomedical event corpus with meta-knowledge annotation. BMC Bioinformatics 12:393.

Thompson, P., Kano, Y., McNaught, J., Pettifer, S., Attwood, T. K., Keane, J. and Ananiadou, S. (2011). Promoting Interoperability of Resources in META-SHARE. In Proceedings of the IJCNLP Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm (LRTS), pp. 50- 58.

Ananiadou, S., Thompson, P., Kano, Y., McNaught, J., Attwood, T. K., Day, P. J. R., Keane, J., Jackson, D. and Pettifer, S. (2011). Towards Interoperability of European Language Resources. Ariadne, 67.