Technolangue: A Permanent Evaluation and Information Infrastructure

In France, Human Language Technologies (HLT) projects, though regularly supported by the French authorities, are usually limited in time and therefore do not offer long-term, continuous exploitation of their results. As an answer to these limitations and needs, the Technolangue programme, launched in 2002 by the three French funding bodies, namely the ministries of Research, Culture and Industry, aims at offering permanent infrastructures, allowing to capitalize on the results of industrial and academic R&D projects, both at national and international levels. The first section of this paper presents an overview of the Technolangue programme and some selected projects. In addition to its involvement in a number of LR projects, ELDA is coordinating two crucial projects in the Evaluation and Technology watch action lines of Technolangue, namely the organisation of an evaluation platform called EVALDA and the implementation of an HLT-oriented information portal known as Technolangue.net. As developed in this paper, the setting up of an evaluation infrastructure and the implementation of a HLT web portal both aim to fit one of the main objectives of the programme, i.e. the creation of permanent actions in the HLT field.