The first main BALRIC-LING objective is to raise awareness in the newly associated Balkan countries Bulgaria and Romania about the potential of the most advanced Human Language Technologies (HLT) and about the possible scientific and industrial applications of the corresponding language resources and tools. It is very important to create such awareness with those countries being on their way to full EC integration and examples of successful HLT marketable applications for Bulgarian and Romanian largely lacking awareness raising is an important issue. Having been isolated for many years from the broad West European scientific exchange of language engineering ideas and practice and having to deal with structurally different languages, the very few advanced HLT-groups from both countries still cannot gather by themselves a critical mass of informed specialists who could raise the quality of Language Engineering (LE) applications for the newly emerging HLT markets in Bulgaria and Romania.
Since HLT is a rather broad field, BALRIC-LING will focus on four topics only:
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word-centred linguistic resources,
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corpora and tagging,
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relevant supporting tools and
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possible advanced HLT usages of (i) and (ii).