The research in the COREA project is conducted in the framework of the STEVIN programme (Spraak- en Taaltechnologische Essentiële Voorzieningen In het Nederlands). STEVIN is a research programme for the Dutch language and speech technology sponsored by the Flemish and Dutch authorities. The STEVIN programme aims at stimulating the language and speech technology in Flanders and the Netherlands, in order to increase its innovative capacity and to strengthen the position of Dutch in information and communication. The STEVIN programme started on 15 September 2004 and has a duration of five years. STEVIN is coordinated and financially maintained by the Dutch Language Union.

The proposed project contributes to the STEVIN priorities by

  • Designing and evaluating a robust and reusable coreference resolution system for Dutch, applicable in a wide range of intelligent text processing applications, such as Information Extraction and Question Answering,
  • Development of an infrastructure for coreference research (consisting of annotation guidelines, an annotation tool and a limited amount of annotated data) which may be used for evaluating alternative systems or for annotating additional material,
  • Enriching part of the Corpus Spoken Dutch with coreference relations
More specifically, the proposed project will contribute to the following lanuage technology priorities mentioned in the STEVIN call for proposals:
  • Richly annotated monolingual Dutch corpora,
  • Semantic analysis,
  • Monolingual information extraction,
  • QA solutions.
With these priorities, the proposed project also addressed the three main aspects of digital language infrastructure development for Dutch: resources, strategic research, and to a lesser extent applications. The project will also integrate the complementary expertise of the Antwerp (machine learning for NLP) and Groningen (full parsing for deep NLP) groups and contributes to knowledge transfer by having a company (Language and Computing) define realistic application scenarios and do the evaluation of the developed system.

Back