Language Grid Revisited: An Infrastructure for Intercultural Collaboration

Since various communities with multiple languages interact in daily life, tools are needed to support intercultural communication. However, we often observe that the success of a multi-language tool in one situation does not guarantee its success in another. To develop multi-language environments that can handle various situations in various communities, existing language resources should be easy to share and customize. Therefore, we designed the Language Grid as service-oriented collective intelligence; it allows users to freely create language services from existing language resources and combine them to develop new services to meet their own requirements. This paper explains the design concept and service architecture of the Language Grid, and our approach to user involvement in collective intelligence activities. An institutional design is also essential for collective intelligence. We create a federated operation model to bridge different stakeholders including service providers, service users, and service grid operators.