NLP12 Paris Declaration

18 November 2013

Hosted by ELRA

The 12 major organisations* from Language Resources and Technologies, Computational Linguistics, and Digital Humanities met on November 18, 2013 in Paris, France to discuss cooperation and harmonisation of their activities.

Reporting on their core missions and sharing common concerns led the organisations to elaborate on a set of important issues and challenges to be jointly addressed:

1. Plan conferences and work out a common coherent planning of major events to avoid overlaps, clashes and boost synergies: the organisations agreed to work on a 6-year cycle conference planning in order to optimise the management of both conference schedules and locations.

2. Identify and discover Language Resources, and promote best practices in Language Resource citation in publications: the organisations agreed to announce the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), a Persistent Unique Identifier, to be assigned to each Language Resource. Experiment replicability, an essential feature of scientific work, would be enhanced by such unique identifier. Set up by ELRA, LDC and AFNLP/Oriental-COCOSDA, the ISLRN Portal will provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, as a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers. It will be supervised by a steering committee composed of representatives of participating organisations and enlarged whenever necessary.

3. Encourage Language Resources and Tools sharing through the use of interoperable formats and easy-to-use licensing schemas, in particular Creative Commons.

4. Join forces to boost bilateral and multilateral partnerships and strengthen the bridges between various communities (e.g. Language technologies and Humanities).

* Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations ( ADHO ), Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), COLING Committee (ICCL), European Data Forum, European Language Resources Association (ELRA), International Association for Machine Translation ( IAMT), International Committee for the Coordination & Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques (COCOSDA), International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), Oriental COCOSDA, Language Resource Management Agency (RMA)