Unlversity

The UNDL Foundation Training and Research Program has been

For the time being, the UNL Program has already crossed important milestones. The overall architecture of the UNL system has been developed with a set of basic engines and tools necessary for its functioning. These are being tested and improved at the UNLdev. A vast amount of linguistic resources from various languages has been accumulated in the last few years through the UNLarium. Moreover, the technical infrastructure for expanding these resources – the UNLweb, which comprises the UNLdev, the UNLarium, the UNLwiki, the UNLforum and VALERIE, the virtual learning environment for UNL – is already in place, thus facilitating the participation of many more languages in the UNL framework from now on.

Nevertheless, the current activities have been based in a set of specifications that, originally proposed 15 years ago, have not incorporated yet several recent advances in the domain of natural language processing, and need some careful revision. Furthermore, the linguistic resources have been rather limited to some major languages, and need to be extended in order to accomplish the main mission of the UNL Program, which is to enable all peoples to communicate with other peoples in their own language. With the purpose of including new languages into the UNL framework and improving the quality of the current specifications, the UNDL Foundation set the UNL TRAINING AND RESEARCH PROGRAM, divided so far in two different but articulated actions:

 UNL PANEL, a three-chapter dialogue with the UNL Community and other senior researchers, in order to identify and solve current shortcomings of the UNL approach; and  UNL SCHOOL, a series of workshops dedicated to the construction of UNL-driven dictionaries and grammars for less-resourced languages.