Any language is eligible, except those already funded by the UNDL Foundation (namely English, French, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Armenian), which should be pursued in the project MIR. Contributions are paid through PayPal according to the UNLdots system. Tasks are distributed upon availability and will be carried out in a distance-working environment through a specific web interface. Candidates are not required to have any previous experience in natural language processing but are expected to have some acquaintance with descriptive Linguistics and a good knowledge of English. Undergraduate and graduate students of Language Studies and Translation Studies from minority and less-resourced languages are especially welcomed.
The Project Le Petit Prince (LPP)
The Project Le Petit Prince (LPP) aims at providing dictionary entries and grammar rules for automatically generating into natural language (NL) the UNL-ized version of Le Petit Prince, the famous novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, first published in 1943. LPP comprises 1,889 different UWs, which are expected to be included in the UNL-NL dictionaries and further treated in the NL dictionaries. Tasks are distributed upon availability and will be carried out in a distance-working environment through a specific web interface. Candidates are not required to have any previous experience in natural language processing but are expected to have some acquaintance with descriptive Linguistics and a good knowledge of English.
Payment
Payment is done every month through PayPal according to the UNLdot system. UNLdot is a unit of time and complexity for measuring the effort spent in performing UNL-related tasks. UNLdots are used not only for calculating how long it takes to create dictionary entries and grammar rules, but also to evaluate the expertise of a given contributor. For the time being, each new dictionary entry or grammar rule corresponds to 1 (one) UNLdot. The rates for UNLdots vary according to the expertise. The current values are the following:
| LEVEL | RATE (1 UNLdot) |
|---|---|
| A0 (below 5,000 UNLdots) | USD 0.25 |
| A1 (5,001 to 15,000 UNLdots) | USD 0.50 |
| A2 (15,000 to 30,000 UNLdots) | USD 0.60 |
| B1 (30,001 to 50,000 UNLdots) | USD 0.70 |
| B2 (50,001 to 75,000 UNLdots) | USD 0.80 |
| C1 (75,001 to 100,000 UNLdots) | USD 0.90 |
| C2 (above 100,001 UNLdots) | USD 1.00 |
Instructions
Candidates must register in the UNLweb and pursue the CLEA certificate. CLEA is a free certification in language description that introduces some of the UNDL Foundation's standards for language engineering. The certificate is offered by VALERIE, the Virtual Learning Environment for UNL. Approved candidates will be accredited to work within the UNLarium, a database management system used to provide the dictionary entries for the project LPP. Candidates must also contact the This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to request the inclusion of the language in the set of funded languages.
Further information
For further information please contact:
Ronaldo MARTINS
Language Resources Manager
UNDL Foundation
48, route de Chancy, CH-1213, Petit-Lancy, Geneva, Switzerland
+41 22 879 8090
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About
The UNDL Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, which has received, from the United Nations, the mandate for implementing the Universal Networking Language (UNL). The UNL is an artificial language that has been used for several different tasks in natural language engineering, such as machine translation, multilingual document generation, summarization, information retrieval and semantic reasoning. It has been, since 1996, a unique initiative to reduce language barriers and strengthen cross-cultural communication in the framework of the UN.
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