The European Union is taking an increasing interest in possible ways of cooperating with Central and Eastern Europe. In light of this, it is essential for the EU to explore and assess the current situation in the Eastern research community in the field of language engineering, and to design scenarios for possible future cooperation between East and West, taking into account the assets and needs of each group. Such a survey can be expected to benefit research organisations in both Western and Eastern Europe: it will not only provide information on potential research partners, but will also allow these organisations to voice their views on the most appropriate cooperative themes and schemes.

As a result of funding and sponsorship from the CEC's COPERNICUS and LRE Programmes, the European Network in Language and Speech (ELSNET) is undertaking a survey of language engineering organisations in Central and Eastern Europe and selected New Independent States (C&EE/NIS). The survey will cover R&D organisations in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Russia, Belorus, and Ukraine.

Apart from the general goals described above, the specific aims of this project are twofold:

1. Fact-finding: To establish a reliable, up-to-date picture of organizations and their activities in C&EE/NIS, across three dimensions. The first dimension is geographical; the second is organizational, covering the span from academic and industrial research laboratories through professional associations to government agencies; the third is sectoral, comprising R&D in NLP and speech technology, standardization, dissemination, training, and policy making.
2. Synthesis: To evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of C&EE/NIS expertise and infrastructure; to assess the market potential of their language technology; to assess the potential for greater coordination within the C&EE/NIS region and for collaboration between the research communities in C&EE/NIS and the European Union; to recommend models for cooperation at a variety of levels.

One important effect of the survey will be to stimulate awareness of the problems and potential of language engineering in the C&EE/NIS region. In addition, the data to be published in the survey will be a valuable source for R&D teams wishing to identify C&EE/NIS partners for projects in research and industrial development. The results will be widely disseminated in both paper and electronic formats.

The Synthesis component of the survey will result in a report, which will help initiate a wide-ranging discussion of priorities, objectives and resource implications for future cooperation actions at both the national and EU level. This report will present a number of options for collaboration, and we expect it to be an important source of facts and models for Western policy-making and funding agencies. It will be based on discussion with a wide range of informed actors, including the ELSNET sites, professional associations like EACL and ESCA, and prominent figures from the Eastern R&D communities.

We expect the report to contain the following information:

• Summary of Results: We will present a digest of the results, organised by three dimensions: by geographical area; by type of actor (academic, industrial, government); and by sector (e.g., natural language, speech, training). Strengths and Weakness: Expertise and Infrastructure: We will examine the scientific and engineering activities of the C&EE/NIS organizations in terms of promise and scientific interest for the EU R&D communities, and taking into account the specific requirements of NL and speech. We will also look at the infrastructure for language engineering in the East, particularly with respect to computational and language resources, collaborative arrangements between teams, and the major economic and political factors governing R&D.
• Market Prospects of C&EE/NIS Language Technology: We will focus on the commercial potential of C&EE/NIS language technologies, both in terms of markets local to the sites involved and at a more global level. We will pay particular attention to the way in which language technology can support the communication requirements of the rapidly growing volume of economic activity between Western and Eastern Europe.
• Prospects for Cooperation: We will look at prospects for different types of cooperation: bilateral collaboration between Western and Eastern institutions; bilateral collaboration between individual EU member states and C&EE/NIS countries; and participation in EU level programmes. Of particular interest will be the relevance of existing or planned cooperation schemes, such as TEMPUS, ERASMUS, TACIS, PHARE, COPERNICUS, PECO, and also of programmes like LRE and ESPRIT which may be open to some forms of cooperation in future.
• Models for Cooperative Actions: We will discuss a range of models and options for different modalities of cooperation, including R&D projects; workshops, conferences and other types of scientific exchange; networks of excellence; common task forces, standardization groups, mechanisms for storage and distribution of language resources; and training schemes, exchanges and summer schools.

All LISA members should be asking themselves why companies like Siemens- Nixdorf, Xerox, Digital, SITE-EUROLANG and CAP debis have teamed up to develop linguistic software tools. Why does this group want to standardize text encoding rules and software development? And probably the best question to ask is: How did they manage to get the CEC to provide them with over 3.2 million ECUs?

Don't be fooled by the pedantic tone of the following project description. It's just part of the game!