Baltic and Nordic Parts of the European Open Linguistic Infrastructure

The META-NORD project aims to establish an open linguistic infrastructure in the Baltic and Nordic countries.

Thus the main objectives of the META-NORD project as established under Objective 6.1 are:

• provide a description of the national landscape in terms of language use; language-savvy products and services, language technologies and resources; main actors; public policies and programmes; prevailing standards and practices; current level of development, main drivers and roadblocks; and create this in a simple, clear, standardized format;

• contribute to a pan-European digital resource exchange facility by collecting resources in Baltic and Nordic countries and by documenting, linking and upgrading them to agreed standards and guidelines;

• collaborate with other partner projects, in particular concurrent 6.1 pilot projects and the META-NET network of excellence;

• help build and operate broad, non-commercial, community-driven, inter-connected repositories, exchanges, and facilities that will be used by language researchers, developers and professionals;

• mobilize national and regional actors, public bodies and funding agencies by raising awareness, organizing meetings and other focused events.The geographic focus of the META-NORD project are the eight Baltic and Nordic countries. This consortium represents eight under-resourced languages with a specific set of objectives:

• provide expertise to other 6.1 pilots in fields where META-NORD partners have outstanding expertise: tree-banks/syntax databases, terminology resources, word-nets and finite-state techniques;

• develop and document methodologies for building language resources for under-resourced languages as efficiently as possible, with focus on semi-automatic/machine assisted resource generation;

• facilitate availability of BLARK resources for META-NORD languages;

• facilitate knowledge transfer between CLARIN and META-NORD, especially on standards and IPR issues.