EUROLAN 2005

A truly global society will rely heavily on access to information that can accommodate multiple cultures and languages. To enable this, researchers in language technology are developing resources and applications to support a multilingual web that will ensure the requisite trans-lingual capabilities.

The EUROLAN 2005 summer school will provide two weeks of intensive study of the technologies and resources currently under development to support multilingual processing, as well as the applications that exploit them to enable multilingual access to information disseminated via the web. Internationally known scholars and researchers involved in leading edge work in relevant areas will serve as professors at the school, giving half- and full-day seminars and hands-on labs to provide students with in-depth understanding and experience. Topics to be covered in the school include the following:

• creation and exploitation of multilingual resources, including corpora, lexicons, wordnets, and ontologies;

• multilingual alignment of syntax, semantics, discourse, and other language phenomena;

• annotation of various phenomena in multiple languages, including word senses, time annotations, anaphora;

• annotation transfer, enabling importing in new languages of knowledge encoded in the mark-up for English, etc.;

• cross-lingual applications, including machine translation, information retrieval, extraction and summarization, document indexing, etc.;

• the multilingual "knowledge web", its philosophy, state of the art, needs, and vision for the future.

EUROLAN 2005 Professors:

Branimir Boguraev, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA;
Dan Cristea, "Al. I. Cuza" University, Romania;
Hamish Cunningham, University of Sheffield, England;
Dieter Fensel, DERI, Austria;
Pascale Fung, University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong;
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA;
Martin Kay, Stanford University, USA;
Bernardo Magnini, IRST-ITC, Italy;
Daniel Marcu, University of Southern California, USA;
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA;
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK;
Vivi Nastase, University of Ottawa, Canada
Nicolas Nicolov, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA;
Constantin Orasan, University of Wolverhampton, UK;
Marius Pasca, Google Inc., USA;
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth;
Emanuele Pianta, IRST-ITC, Italy;
Oana Postolache, Saarland University, Germany;
Georgiana Puscasu, University of Wolverhampton, England;
Michael Stollberg, DERI, Austria;
Valentin Tablan, University of Sheffield, UK;
Dan-Ioan Tufis, Romanian Academy, Romania;
David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins University, USA.

The venue of EUROLAN 2005 is Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in the heart of Transylvania. An excursion to the medieval town of Sighisoara and Bran ("Dracula") Castle is planned for the weekend at the school's mid-point.

Whatever the venue, the EUROLAN summer schools are well known for the degree of camaraderie that develops among students and professors alike - just ask any previous participant! Students in the school learn an enormous amount, but at the same time enjoy the warmth of new friendships with both fellow students and professors.