The National Language Service of the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) has once again made inroads on the South African Human Language Technology (HLT) landscape by appointing an implementation agency to set up a national HLT Resource Management Agency (RMA).
The Centre for Text Technology (CTexT) of the North-West University will be responsible for creating the infrastructure to efficiently consolidate existing text and speech resources in all official South African languages (though not exclusively) and make these accessible to researchers and developers under appropriate licences.
It is foreseen that the RMA will play a vital role in the creation, standardisation and organising of reusable resources, thereby effectively addressing the current situation where HLT development is often hampered by a lack of even the most basics in terms of data and technologies.
The RMA forms the third component of the virtual National Centre for HLT (NCHLT) which was approved by Cabinet in December 2008. The other two components are for text and speech resource development, respectively. These have been in operation for the past two years.
All other HLT projects previously or currently funded by the DAC are set to produce outputs that can be released under open source licences, and will be catalogued at the RMA to ensure accessibility. In time it is hoped that other sources of linguistic resources, such as publishers and the media, will consider committing content to the RMA to licence under certain conditions.
The RMA web interface will be published at the end of August 2012, along with a first version of the South African HLT Index, based on the 2009 NHN Technology Audit. The first HLT catalogue of resources available for licensing will be made available early in 2013.
For more information, contact the following:
Ulrike Janke
Cell: 082 677 2624
Email: ulrike.janke@dac.gov.za
Martin Puttkammer
Cell: 018 299 1502
Email: martin.puttkammer@nwu.ac.za
