Based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Grenoble, France, The Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE) is also a research organization of the international company XEROX, which focuses on increasing productivity in the workplace through new document technologies, with several tools and projects relating to languages.
One of Xerox's research activities is MultiLingual Theory and Technology (MLTT), to study how to analyze and generate text in many languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, etc.). The MLTT team creates basic tools for linguistic analysis, e.g. morphological analysers, parsing and generation platforms and corpus analysis tools. These tools are used to develop descriptions of various languages and the relation between them. Currently under development are phrasal parsers for French and German, a lexical functional grammar (LFG) for French and projects on multilingual information retrieval, translation and generation.
Founded in 1979, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is a non-profit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artificial intelligence, improve the teaching and training of AI practitioners, and provide guidance for research planners and funders concerning the importance and potential of current AI developments and future directions.
The Institut Dalle Molle pour les études sémantiques et cognitives (ISSCO) (Dalle Molle Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies) is a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva, Switzerland, which conducts basic and applied research in computational linguistics (CL), and artificial intelligence (AI). The site gives a presentation of the ISSCO projects (European projects, projects of the Swiss National Science Foundation, projects of the French-speaking community, etc.).
Created by the Foundation Dalle Molle in 1972 for research into cognition and semantics, ISSCO has come to specialize in natural language processing and, in particular, in multilingual language processing, in a number of areas : machine translation, linguistic environments, multilingual generation, discourse processing, data collection, etc. The University of Geneva provides administrative support and infrastructure for ISSCO. The research is funded solely by grants and by contracts with public and private bodies.
ISSCO is multi-disciplinary and multi-national, "drawing its staff and its visitors from the disciplines of computer science, linguistics, mathematics, psychology and philosophy. The long-term staff of the Institute is relatively small in number; with a much larger number of visitors coming for stays ranging from a month to two years. This ensures a continual exchange of ideas and encourages flexibility of approach amongst those associated with the Institute."
The International Conferences on Computational Linguistics (COLINGs) are organized every two years by the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL).
"The International Committee on Computational Linguistics was set up by David Hays in the mid-Sixties as a permanent body to run international computational linguistics conferences in an original way, with no permanent secretariat, subscriptions or funds. It was ahead of its time in that and other ways. COLING has always been distinguished by pleasant venues and atmosphere, rather than by the clinical efficiency of an airport conference hotel: COLINGs are simply nice conferences to be at. […] In recent years, the ACL [Association for Computational Linguistics] has given great assistance and cooperation in keeping COLING proceedings available and distributed."
5.3. Language Engineering
Launched in January 1999 by the European Commission, the website HLTCentral (HLT: Human Language Technologies) gives a short definition of language engineering: