Building a virtual European Institute of Human Language Technologies

1. Building a virtual European Institute of Human Language Technologies Steven Krauwer Utrecht University / ELSNET Steven.Krauwer@elsnet.org ARC Network, Sydney

2. Overview • What is ELSNET • What we do • Instruments we use • Our internal structure • Some practical points • The virtual European Institute 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 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 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) 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 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 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) ARC Network, Sydney

9. The ELSNET temple roadmapping training info dissemination tech transfer resources, standards, evaluation 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 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 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 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 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) 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 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) 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 ARC Network, Sydney

18. 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 Typical ELSNET topics 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 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 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! 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) 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 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 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) 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 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 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?” ARC Network, Sydney

29. End of this presentation More info: http://www.elsnet.org Steven.Krauwer@elsnet.org ARC Network, Sydney