Activities of IMS in the framework of ELSNET

The following is a short summary of the relevant activities of IMS Stuttgart (``STR'') as a Managing Node of ELSNET, in the period comprised between January and end December 1995.

• acting as Managing Node for ELSNET in Germany and Austria;
• contribution to the work of the ELSNET Executive Board;
• preparation of a small morphosyntactically annotated reference corpus for German (60,000 word forms), in the framework of the ELSNET Reusable Resources Task Group (RRTG).

Executive Board Activities

• Contribution to the ELSNET Executive Board Meetings held in Stockholm, Leuven and London;
• contributions to the proposal for a second ELSNET (time frame 1996/1998);
• several contributions to ELSNET's actions in the field of evaluation:
  • ELSNET brainstorming meeting on evaluation and assessment (17-7-95);
  • contribution (in December 1995 and January 1996) to the preparation of a project proposal on the evaluation and best practice in the field of Spoken Languages Dialogue Systems and Components (DISC), submitted in January 1996 to ESPRIT/LTR.

Reusable Resources Task Group

As proposed and scientifically organized by STR, in 1995 a joint action between ELSNET's RRTG and the EAGLES/Computational Lexicons Workgroup has taken place. On the basis of proposals for lexical description and annotation, worked out in EAGLES, two small text samples (newspaper text from different fields) one for Italian (carried out by Pisa) and one for German (carried out by STR) have been morpho-syntactically annotated and manually corrected. Thus, the Resources Task Group has produced small ``reference corpora'' which will be disseminated in early 1996, in a joint package, most likely through ELRA. The package will include EAGLES documents and possibly tools from STR and PSA.

In this framework, the following actions have been carried out and documented:

• selection of a 60,000 words sample from newspaper text material of German; material comes from the ECI MC-1;
• manual annotation, in two steps, of the text material, with a 10% overlap between the individuals carrying out the encoding work;
• regular monitoring of the manual annotation work, to ensure consistency of the output;
• preparation of information documents about the corpus annotation, for the ELSNET Executive Board, the ELSNET and EAGLES communities;