Historical Development and Future Directions in Data Resource Development

On February 25,26 2007, the second of two workshops entitled “Meeting of the MINDS: Future Directions for Human Language Technology,” sponsored by the U.S. Government's Disruptive Technology Office (DTO), was held in Marina del Rey, California. “MINDS” is an acronym for Machine Translation (MT), Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Data Resources (Data), and Speech Understanding (ASR) which were the 5 areas, each addressed by a number of experienced researchers, at this workshop. The goal of these working groups was to identify and discuss especially promising future research directions that could lead to major paradigm shifts and which are yet to be funded. As a continuation of a prior workshop where each group (except Data Resources) had first reviewed major past developments in their respective fields and the circumstances that led to their success, this workshop began by reviewing and refining the suggestions for future research emanating from the first workshop. The different areas then met in pairs to discuss possible cross-fertilizations and collaborations. Each area is responsible for producing a report proposing 5 to 6 Grand Challenges.