On May 8th, 2018, the 1st Workshop on the Belt and Road Language Resources and Evaluation, jointly organized by ACLR and Chinese Information Processing Society, was successfully held in Miyazaki, Japan. The workshop was held under the 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018), with more than 20 papers received from researchers of countries such as China, France and Kazakhstan.
Prof. Li Yuming, Director of ALCR, addressed at the workshop and delivered a keynote speech on The Era's Call for Language Resources.He pointed out that language resources consist of natural language resources, language products resources and derived language resources. In terms of language protection, language intelligence, knowledge mining and other fields, the society today is in urgent demand for language resources, so it is certain that there will be an era of big data in language. Language resources can be acquired and better utilized through digital ways such as automatic annotation, automatic analysis, independent learning and other key technologies, and a database should be established for experts in various fields to study. He also said that the digitalization of language resources will definitely result in some ethical problems, so it is necessary to organize the forums on ethics for future society, where scholars of various subjects share their views on problems of “bridle and brake” (management and control) for future society and ensure human safety in the era of artificial intelligence by developing new ethics. His report aroused strong response among the scholars present.
During the meeting, Director Li Yuming, Prof. Yang Erhong had a discussion with Ms. Gail Kent, Director of Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission, Mr. Marco Marcella, Head of Multilingualism and Accessibility of Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, Ms. Nicoletta Calzolari Zamorani, Honorary President of European Language Resources Association and Chairman of LREC and Dr.Khalid Choukri, Secretary General of European Language Resources Association. The two sides introduced the current projects progress and exchanged views on the cooperation in countries along the Belt and Road, of European language resources construction and technological development.
At the workshop, a panel discussion was also organized in addition to the reports. Participants had an in-depth discussion on the construction, technology and sharing of less-resourced language resources.
The Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), held every two years, has a profound influence in the language and technology field. On May 7th to 12th 2018, the LREC 2018 in Miyazaki marked the 11th conference ever held and was the first time convened in Asia. The Workshop on the Belt and Road Language Resources and Evaluation is an international academic meeting which was held abroad for the first time by ACLR, aiming to bring in researchers on relevant fields who are willing to participate in the construction of ACLR, explore mechanisms of language resources collection, processing, preservation and sharing, push the establishment of language resources standards and norms, and promote the application of language tools and technologies in language resources.
