COCOSDA is an international organisation which has a global concern for the development of spoken language resources that can provide a solid basis for the scientific assessment of spoken language technologies and the extension of speech technology throughout the world. At the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation held in Athens in May 2000, COCOSDA was restructured to strengthen its global coverage and to recognise its distinctive technical and regional roles in fulfilling its mission. Its current plan is to define "Topic Domains" and "Regional Programs" as the two dimensions of its functions. The former reflects the dynamic technology environments, while the latter addresses the regional differences and activities. Four topic domains are currently established: Evaluation of Speech Understanding/Dialogue Systems, Multi-Modal Corpora, Corpus Annotation Tools and Local Languages. Six regional programs are currently under planning: North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Latin America and Africa. One current project for COCOSDA is to collect all relevant information and construct Websites for the topic domains and regional programs so as to serve the spoken language research community.
A questionnaire has been prepared in order to collect such information for each specific region and topic domain. Please find the OCEANIA region questionnaire on this site.
As COCOSDA rapporteur for Oceania, I am aiming to define a regional framework that can best serve this very distinctive region. COCOSDA does not wish to supplant existing work that overlaps with its agenda, but rather offer coordination (both within and across regions) and the facilitation of partnership between expert bodies that are currently at work or perhaps striving to work at the task of developing language resources for the region. These expert bodies or individual personnel are likely to be working either in Linguistic Analysis or in Language Technology areas, and in some serendipitous instances, in both areas.
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The first task that I would like to achieve is to develop a database of relevant facts on the region. It is my preference to utilise (with full acknowledgement) whatever data structures are already available and to integrate new data as it becomes available. I am therefore asking my various contacts for information first of all about "people" who are actively working in the region. These people are likely to be able to provide, or indicate the location of, data on the language resource base that currently exists, or has a reasonable prospect of being brought into existence. If you can contribute some names and e-mail addresses of people who are working in language analysis or technology in the region I would be most grateful.
I would like to identify a "correspondent" in each of the countries or administrative territories in the region.
This web-site will be the repository for information that is gathered. I am happy to receive information in any form. I am currently trying to expand responsibility for this endeavour and will inform of developments as others become involved.
Please contact me if you would like more information about COCOSDA-OCEANIA.
Bruce Millar - 3 March 2008