Estonia's Ministry of Education and Research is funding the development of open source tools for linguistic analysis. It recently published a procurement request for software tools that integrate software and language. The ministry is asking for software that can overcome language barriers, aiming to enable semi automatic and fully automatic machine translation, speech recognition and speech systems.
The projects should support open standards and those submitting offers are asked to choose an open source license such as the BSD, LGPL or GPL for their projects. The deadline for submitting offers will pass on 15 March.
The project is organised by the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology (Eesti Keeletehnoloogia). It is not the first time that EKT is funding development of open source code. Late last year it published a request for tender for tools that allow linguistic morphology. This application, EKT writes, should allow determining the structure of word and correctly find linguistic structures such as stem and suffix. "These are important requirements to tackle technological challenges such as determining the basis of words and allowing searching for words."
The software should help tackle some of the technological challenges of combining software development with the Estonian language. The ministry aims to boost the future development of applications like for example for speech synthesis, useful for the visual impaired, or speech recognition. Such software should also be useful for those wanting to develop spell-checking software. The ministry also hopes it will enable solutions for semantic analysis, allowing communication between machines and people.
More information:
2013 Estonian language technology procurement announcement (in Estonian)
Announcement by the ministry of Education and Research (in Estonian)
Announcement by the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology (in Estonian)