PANACEA · Platform for Automatic, Normalized Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition of Language Resources for Human Language Technologies

A strategic challenge for Europe in today's globalised economy is to overcome language barriers through technological means. In particular, Machine Translation systems are expected to have a significant impact in the managing of multilingualism in Europe.PANACEA is facing the most critical aspect for Machine Translation to produce this expected impact in Europe: the called resources bottleneck. MT technologies are in themselves language independent, but they are inherently tied to the availability of language dependent resources.PANACEA will be an integrated machinery for the production of Language Resources (LR) designed in line with new paradigms of software development that rely on a future internet made as a global and open service delivery platform. PANACEA is designed as a dedicated workflow manager for the composition of an open number of systems based on combinations of different webservices. While webservices considered by the project will be limited in number, the proposed way of assembling them in workflow chains using metadata and standards will make of PANACEA and open and interoperable platform also capable of integrating new components as needed for the production of new LR.PANACEA is to shape a LR factory that step by step covers the automation of all the stages involved in the acquisition, production, updating and maintenance of LR required by MT systems and in the time required. Automation will significantly cut down the economic and temporal costs of the supply of LR. This reduction of costs and time are the only way to guarantee the massive supply of LR that Machine Translation and other Language Technologies will be demanding in the multilingual Europe. Evaluation in an industrial scenario will be the proof of concept of the benefits offered by PANACEA and its potential impact.