Introduction and Context
Submissions are invited for papers to a special issue of the journal “Language Resources and Evaluation” on Language Technology platforms.
With the increasing number of platforms, grids and infrastructures in the wider area of Language Technologies (LT), NLP, NLU, speech (including conversational agents and personal assistants), interaction and language-centric AI, there is a growing need for sharing experiences, approaches and best practices eventually to learn and benefit from the work of others and also, practically, to start a collaboration towards LT platform interoperability.
This LRE Journal Special Issue aims to address all smaller and larger language grids, language-related infrastructures and platforms (including general and domain-specific) as well as research projects that touch upon one or more of the topics mentioned below, both in Europe and world-wide. With its origin in the 1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms (IWLTP 2020), the goal of this LRE Journal Special Issue is to assemble submissions from representatives of relevant initiatives and interested parties to present their observations, experiences, solutions, best practices as well as current and future challenges. The LRE Journal Special Issue also addresses the aspect of fragmentation in the Language Technology landscape, especially in Europe. Instead of “platform islands” that simply co-exist side by side, possibly even competing with each other, we want to foster the discussion how our platforms can be made interoperable and how they can interact with one another to create synergies towards a productive LT platform ecosystem.
The long-term vision of platform interoperability has several prerequisites including technical requirements that need to be addressed, for example, through the use of common standards, but also community-related aspects that need to be addressed and strengthened through open discussions and further joint development. Both aspects are covered by this LRE Special Issue.