Proceedings - Österreichische Gesellschaft für Artificial Intelligence

Preface
The need for automatically generated and processed linguistic resources has increased dramatically in
recent years, due to the fact that linguistic resources are used in a wide variety of applications,
including machine translation, information retrieval and extraction, sentiment analysis, lexicon
creation, linguistic applications of machine learning, and so on.
Building linguistic resources is generally expensive, time-consuming, and requires highly specialized
skills. It is important, therefore, for these resources to be reusable and inter-operable, for the benefit
of the commercial and research communities. This would allow the same resources to be applied in
different applications and possibly in different research areas. To achieve this, one fundamental
problem is the issue of standardization of linguistic resources.
Language resource standards define, for example, how linguistic data can be created, imported and
integrated in a platform-independent way. The relevant standardization activities are currently
conducted by ISO/TC 37/SC 4, an international working group (‘sub-committee’) of the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO).
The objective of subcommittee ISO/TC 37/SC 4 is to develop international standards and guidelines
for effective language resource management in mono- and multilingual applications. It also develops
principles and methods for representations and annotations of data, for the creation of categories for
thesauri, ontologies, morphological and syntactic analysis and so on.
Subcommittee ISO/TC 37/SC 4 has so far published standards such as LAF (Linguistic Annotation
Framework, ISO 24612:2012), SynLAF (Syntactic Annotation Framework, 24615:2010), LMF
(Lexical Markup Framework, ISO 24613:2008). These standards define metamodels for data
representation or the termsterminologies for data description and specify general requirements for
linguistic resources. Other standards such as MAF (Morpho-syntactic Annotation Framework,
ISO/FDIS 24611) and MLIF (Multilingual Information Framework, ISO 16642:2003) are still under
development. Although a lot of work has been accomplished in over the past few years, there are
still many goals to accomplish and much work to be done.
The goal of this workshop is to present the current status of ISO standards in the domain of language
resources and language technology, and to discuss current and future applications of these standards.
A number of academics and experts from industry will present their work in the field of
standardization and application of linguistic resources.
The workshop includes tutorials, research presentations, use-cases and reports that allow participants
to get acquainted with the standards. The workshop organizers Andreas Witt and Ulrich Heid
currently chair the German DIN group for language resource standards. Andreas Witt also convened
the ISO working group Linguistic Annotation (ISO/TC 37/SC 4/WG 6).
Andreas Witt, Ulrich Heid
Workshop Organizers
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