NLP in Ireland: A Conference and Directory

Introduction

NLP has the potential to make a very significant contribution to the usefulness of information technology in the long term future. Example key growth areas are automatic localisation of software and its documentation, information retrieval, machine assisted translation, grammatical and stylistic analysis, natural language interfaces for databases, and so on. There have recently been a number of very interesting developments in the NLP field:

• A growing number of groups are discovering the potential of large scale linguistic resources such as machine readable dictionaries, tagged linguistic corpora and bi-lingual texts.
• The existence of these resources has allowed the development of NLP system components such as part-of-speech taggers and machine tractable lexicons.
• Standards are being established for the representation of linguistic formalisms and data. Internationally supported projects such as the Text Encoding Initiative have recently appeared with the specific objective of creating and disseminating such standards.
• There is a move towards freer exchange of information, data and software between groups. This is exemplified by the growing number of electronic newsgroups dedicated to NLP, and by the formation of international clearing houses such as the Consortium for Lexical Research. Access to these resources has been greatly facilitated by the extension of the internet to Europe.
• The fields of text processing and natural language processing are gradually converging. For example style checkers are often incorporated into word processors. Developments of this kind are greatly expanding the potential market for NLP products.

The NLPI Conference

The Directory of NLP Interests in Ireland

• Individual Entries by Organisation
• Individual Entries by Name
• Organization Entries
• Adding/Updating Directory Entries