Widad Mustafa El Hadi

Human Language Technology and Its Role in Information Access and Management

SUMMARY The role of linguistics in information access,1 extraction and dissemination is essential. Radical changes in the techniques of information and communication at the end of the twentieth century have had a significant effect on the function of the linguistic paradigm and its applications in all forms of communication. The introduction of new technical means have deeply changed the possibilities for the distribution of information. In this situation, what is the role of the linguistic paradigm and its practical applications, i.e., natural language processing (NLP) techniques when applied to information access? What solutions can linguistics offer in human computer interaction, extraction and management? Many fields show the relevance of the linguistic paradigm through the various technologies that require NLP, such as document and message understanding, information detection, extraction, and retrieval, question and answer, cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), text summarization, filtering, and spoken document retrieval. This paper focuses on the central role of human language technologies in the information society, surveys the current situation, describes the benefits of the above mentioned applications, outlines successes and challenges, and discusses solutions. It reviews the resources and means needed to advance information access and dissemination across language boundaries in the twenty-first century. Multilingualism, which is a natural result of globalization, requires more effort in the direction of language technology. The scope of human language technology (HLT) is large, so we limit our review to applications that involve multilinguality.

The ARC A3 project: terminology acquisition tools: evaluation method and task

This paper describes the work achieved in the Concerted Research Project ARC A3 supported and coordinated by the AUF, former Aupelf-Uref. The project deals with the evaluation of term and semantic relation extraction from corpora in French. Eight participants, both from public institutions and industrial corporations were involved in this project and were responsible for producing corpora suitable for extraction tasks and elaborating a protocol in order to evaluate objectively terminology acquisition tools. This expression covers respectively, term extractors, classifiers and semantic relation extractors, The paper also reports on the methodology used for comparing four term extractors, one classifier and three semantic relation extractors during the 2000 evaluation campaign. There are also several by-products of this campaign: first, two corpora which can be used for NLP system development and evaluation as the AUF recommended; and then terminology products: for each corpus a list of terms characterizing the field is available. We are not giving details about the results but rather an assessment of what the evaluation of Terminology Extraction Tools is: how was it done, what were the difficulties, which are the advantages and disadvantages of the adopted protocol, what are the limits and how should we proceed for future testing.