Language Technology Challenges of a 'Small' Language (Catalan)

In this paper, we present a brief snapshot of the state of affairs in computational processing of Catalan and the initiatives that are starting to take place in an effort to bring the field a step forward, by making a better and more efficient use of the already existing resources and tools, by bridging the gap between research and market, and by establishing periodical meeting points for the community. In particular, we present the results of the First Workshop on the Computational Processing of Catalan, which succeeded in putting together a fair representation of the research in the area, and received attention from both the industry and the administration. Aside from facilitating communication among researchers and between developers and users, the Workshop provided the organizers with valuable information about existing resources, tools, developers and providers. This information has allowed us to go a step further by setting up a “harvesting” procedure which will hopefully build the seed of a portal-catalogue-observatory of language resources and technologies in Catalan.