COLLATE: Competence Center in Speech and Language Technology

This paper presents the structure and activitities of the recently established Competence Center in Speech and Language Technology in Saarbrücken. The objectives of the Competence Center are to provide a comprehensive information service about speech and language technologies, including live demonstrations of the most important language technology (LT) systems, and to advance the state of the art in the evaluation of LT systems for real-world applications. The Competence Center comprises the following components: 1. the Virtual Information Center “Language Technology World” (www.lt-world.org), the world's most comprehensive information resource about speech and language technology, 2. the Demonstration Center in Saarbrücken, which offers interested parties the possibility to play and experiment with different speech and language technologies, or to attend guided demonstrations, 3. the Evaluation Center, which conducts evaluations of the overall usability of language technology systems and advances knowledge of relevant usability issues and evaluation methods. The work presented in this paper was carried out by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in collaboration with Saarland University in the context of the project COLLATE (COmputational Linguistics and LAnguage TEchnology for Real Life Applications), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (www.bmbf.de).