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Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 1
Building a virtual European Institute of Human Language
TechnologiesSteven Krauwer
Utrecht University / ELSNET
Steven.Krauwer@elsnet.org
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 2
Overview
• What is ELSNET
• What we do
• Instruments we use
• Our internal structure
• Some practical points
• The virtual European Institute
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 3
What is ELSNET
• European Network in Human Language Technologies (ca 140 academic and industrial member organisations)
• Funded by the European Commission• Created in 1991 as one network out of (eventually) ca 25• Objectives
– bringing together the language and speech communities– bringing together academia and industry– facilitating R&D in language and speech technology
• Info: elsnet@elsnet.org http://www.elsnet.org
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 4
Main areas of activity
• Main ingredients of European Networks of Excellence (from 1991 until the redefinition of the concept in 2003, see later):– Research coordination– Training– Information dissemination– Knowledge transfer between academia and
industry
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 5
Research coordination
• Direct coordination very hard: every research project has a funder who has his own expectations and claims
• Indirect coordination more promising:– Use funds to take new joint initiatives
– Use funds to bring together people who might benefit from each other’s activities
– Use funds to establish a longer term research agenda (roadmapping)
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 6
Training
• Addressing people already in the field or just entering:– Summer schools on typical ELSNET topics for those
who have more time than money– Bullet courses for those who have more money than time
• Mostly addressing academics– Workshops or events on training related issues– Tutorials on special ELSNET topics– Curriculum development: 1 year Masters curriculum in
Language and Speech Technology
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 7
Information dissemination
• Website for internal communication within the community, but also to create awareness in the outside world
• Mailing lists (announcements, discussions, job ads)
• Paper magazine (proactive dissemination)
• Central information point
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 8
Knowledge transfer
• Important, but very hard to find the right model
• Best approximation:– Best practice projects– Best practice website– Best practice summer schools and courses– Providing access to expertise (directories of
experts and organisations world-wide)
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 9
The ELSNET temple
roadmapping
traininginfo dissemination
tech transfer
resources, standards, evaluation
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 10
Missions
• General research aims: help increasing our knowledge and understanding of language and speech technology
• What our funders want: improving our (Europe’s) competitive position
• Special language touch: strong focus on resources, standards and evaluation
• Special European touch: let R&D for smaller languages benefit from what is happening for the major languages
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 11
Languages
The Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.org):
• Europe: 230 languages
• The Americas: 1013 languages
• The Pacific: 1311 languages
• Africa: 2058 languages
• Asia: 2197 languages
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 12
Our role
• Try to do things that would not have happened otherwise
• Try to act as a catalyst rather than as a funder
• Try to act as a bridge between communities
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 13
Measuring success
• Very hard, because you cannot prove that things would have been otherwise if it hadn’t been for ELSNET
• Bureaucrats love objective measures such as participation in events, hits on the website, circulation of the newsletter, but I don’t really believe in them as real success indicators
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 14
Some priorities
• Strong emphasis on generic issues with a (potentially) long term impact for the community at large, such as– Standards– Language Resources– Evaluation
• Strong emphasis on interdisciplinary activities (in the ELSNET context mostly speech/language)
• Try to develop common visions of the future (roadmapping)
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 15
What is a roadmap
• A broadly supported vision of where our field is going (research, technology, market)
• Roadmapping as we see it is not about predicting the future but about managing expectations
• A coherent, consistent and broadly supported view should help us (= researchers, developers, providers, funders, educators) to– identify main challenges– set intermediate milestones– concentrate efforts– measure progress and (if necessary) adjust goals
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 16
Some instruments
• Paying for research: not allowed (and would not have any added value anyway)
• Travel grants for staff and PhDs: risky (no limit to what people will ask) but useful to make your community feel they benefit directly from it
• Funding invited speakers on specific ELSNET topics
• Organizing workshops, panels, etc to bring people together or to promote the goals (awareness)
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 17
Some more instruments
• Either partial reimbursement or one-for-one• Organise events in conjunction with main
conferences• Try to convert requests for funding into co-
organization of activities following from our programme of work
• Publish books on the basis of summer schools to reach a broader audience
• Endorsement of events organised by members or of other high quality events
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 18
Typical ELSNET topics
• Illustrated by Summer School topics:– 1993: Prosody
– 1994: Corpus based methods
– 1995: Spoken dialogue systems
– 1996: Multilinguality
– 1997: Robustness
– 1998: Multimodality
– 1999: The lexicon
– 2000: Access to information
– 2001: Annotation of corpora
– 2002: Evaluation
– 2003: Computer assisted language learning
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 19
Industrial involvement
• 60% of our members are academic institutes, 40% are industrial
• Industrials hard to mobilize because they are driven by their own priorities
• Rather successful model: let academics do all the work and invite industrials to join an industrial advisory panel (with early access to information), but without any commitment to do anything
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 20
Pragmatic points
• For all practical purposes we have adopted the hub and spoke model: strong coordination point (the ELSNET Office) rather than a 100% distributed approach
• Dedicated staff (e.g. 40% coordinator, 40% info collection and dissemination, 80% administrator) needed to keep things moving
• One single contact point for the network: www.elsnet.org for the web, elsnet@elsnet.org for email
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 21
Decision taking
• Executive Board, ca 9 high level experts, meeting 3 times per year (could be electronically if necessary)
• Cooptation in order to ensure proper thematic and geographical balance
• Task groups or committees for specific tasks
• Watch out for the celebrity syndrome!
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 22
Financial matters
• Average annual budget ca 300 keuro• Keep the money in one place, if possible, in order to
prevent fragmentation of the budget
• Reimbursement system
• Allocate funds to activities rather than to participants (allows for flexible task allocation and for joining in later of new participants)
• Allow for flexibility in order to be able to adapt to the dynamics of the field (emerging trends or needs)
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 23
Where does the money go
• Main cost items:– Coordination point (labour, ca 150 keuro/yr)
– Travel (moving around members plus invited experts)
– ELSNews (quarterly paper magazine, ca 60 keuro/yr)
– Summer school (ca 20 keuro/yr)
• Forbidden items: research, student grants, support for non-EU activities
• Lots of silly bureaucratic constraints
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 24
Other issues
• Internationalization: Try to embed your activities internationally – but check with your funders
• Paper magazine (quarterly): widely appreciated, more effective than electronic variants, but expensive (60 keuro pr year)
• Moving towards more permanent structures in Europe is hard:– EU is opposed to permanent funding– National funders and industry not interested in
supporting facilitation of European R&D at large
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 25
Continuity
• ELSNET has always presented itself as a permanent structure, but technically it is a series of independent contracts, with no EC commitment beyond duration of the contract
• We have set up a (light) legal entity, the ELSNET Foundation to own the brand, to ensure some continuity and to be able to enter into contracts (e.g. publishers)
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 26
Our immediate future• Present funding contract expires this summer, no
follow-up funding yet• Language and speech technology have
disappeared from the EU research agenda for the new Framework Programme (FP6)
• Replaced by ‘Interfaces’, ‘Cognitive systems’, ‘Knowledge management’
• Not the first funding gap, but the conditions are very bad; we can still stretch it until Summer 2005 if we keep expenditure low
• But FP7 is already in the oven, and seems to be more promising
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 27
The new network concept
• EU has redefined the Network of Excellence concept:
• Moving away from ‘spreading excellence’ to ‘boosting excellence’, resulting in an elitist approach
• Real research coordination much more prominent: – Partners are obliged to commit part of their research
resources– Support for a limited period, result should be a self-
sustaining permanent research coordination framework
Feb 16-17 2004 ARC Network, Sydney 28
The Virtual Institute
• Still a dream: the creation of a virtual European institute in language and speech technology
• Should be part of the European Research Area
• First attempt failed: “Why this complex structure on top a an otherwise successful network?”
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