The Use of Language Resources & the Benefits for Institutions and Organisations

Language resources are to be used in two different ways: systems elaboration, and their evaluation:

Elaboration of systems: spoken or written language processing systems are based on the use of corpora. For example, the performance of the systems available for text retrieval and filtering or machine-assisted translation tools mainly depends on the amount of linguistic data that are to be used to train the system. Corpora also allow you to build indirect language resources, i.e. specialised lexicons based on a group of technical texts.

Evaluation of systems: language resources, e.g. large-size corpora, are used to evaluate and compare each other the systems which have already been developed: information filtering, orthographic and grammatical check, text retrieval, etc. Efficient and useful evaluations, which are based on appropriate and large corpora, are especially important to measure the changes and progress which have been made, and to disseminate and increase the value of the search results.

More information about the evaluation activity, and ELRA’s involvement in this area are available here.

Benefits for a Company:

Sectors like telecommunication, information & communication, international & multilingual business, public interest and education & training, work systematically with human languages for translation, automated translation, terminology, text recognition, extraction, etc purposes.

By using language-equipped products, the benefits for those companies and institutions are numerous:

 They can extend their market segments, reaching a wider audience, and making their products more accessible.
 They can increase cost-effectiveness.
 They can develop better concept understanding for customers.
 They can improve accuracy rates.
 They can improve internal and external communication.
 They can improve services and information.
 They can reduce reaction time.