Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch

The book provides an overview of more than a decade of joint R&D efforts in the Low Countries on HLT for Dutch. It not only presents the state of the art of HLT for Dutch in the areas covered, but, even more importantly, a description of the resources (data and tools) for Dutch that have been created  are now  available for both academia and industry worldwide.

The contributions cover many areas of human language technology (for Dutch): corpus collection (including IPR issues) and building (in particular one corpus aiming at a collection of 500M word tokens), lexicology, anaphora resolution, a semantic network, parsing technology, speech recognition, machine translation, text (summaries) generation, web mining, information extraction, and text to speech to name the most important ones.

The book also shows how a medium-sized language community (spanning two territories) can create a digital language infrastructure (resources, tools, etc.) as a basis for subsequent R&D. At the same time, it bundles contributions of almost all the HLT research groups in Flanders and the Netherlands, hence offers a view of their recent research activities.

Targeted readers are mainly researchers in human language technology, in particular those focusing on Dutch. It concerns researchers active in larger networks such as the CLARIN, META-NET, FLaReNet and participating in conferences such as ACL, EACL, NAACL, COLING, RANLP, CICling, LREC, CLIN and DIR ( both in the Low Countries), InterSpeech, ASRU, ICASSP, ISCA, EUSIPCO, CLEF, TREC, etc. In addition, some chapters are interesting for human language technology  policy makers and even for science policy makers in general.

From the book reviews:

“The book offers an impressive documentation of transnational joint research and development in language and speech technology from the past decade, that has been characterized by international reviewers as a front-running, exemplary effort. … it is a must-read for prospective BLARK developers, HLT resource centers, and language unions everywhere … .” (Antal van den Bosch, Machine Translation, Vol. 28, 2014)

Dr. Peter Spyns works for the Flemish Department of Economy, Science and Innovation on innovation policy preparation, including human language technology and digital heritage. He is part-time seconded to the Dutch Language Union where he coordinated the STEVIN programme, supervises the HLT Agency, and participates in CLARIN-ERIC committees. Previously, he worked in academia and industry on medical language processing, ontology modelling and dialogue systems.

Prof. Dr. Jan Odijk is professor of Language and Speech Technology at Utrecht University. Previously, he worked more than 23 years in language and speech technology industry, both in the Netherlands and in Flanders. His current research focuses on infrastructures for humanities researchers that include language and speech technology services.