Translation skills

Search Engine experience

Internet technology skills

Specialised information expertise

European project management skills

Information networking

1 - SYSTRAN (the "Coordinator"), will provide:

• Its expertise in the field of linguistics and translation software, providing the consortium with all the required knowledge in Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing (indexation tools, coding tools, translation services)
• developing new languages tools. Systran has developed an English to Arabic MT system, and will be able to develop the Arabic analysis, so creating new language pairs Arabic to English and French, and linguistic dictionaries for use in search or translation technologies.
• Its expertise in Project co-ordination

Systran will call on Joseph Dichy, Professeur de linguistique et de didactique de l'arabe, Pr. Mohamed Hassoun, and Université Lumière-Lyon 2 for their expertise in Arabic language processing.

Systran will tightly collaborate with IRSIT and Amman University, receiving at its premises one linguist from each of them during the whole duration of the project. So there will be a permanent exchange of expertise and know-how on Arabic language and NLP technologies. As the CEA is close to Systran, the knowledge sharing will be efficient.

2 - The CEA will provide its expertise in search engines and especially crosslingual search engines. This expertise is based on more than 30 years of research and more than 20 year of product exploitation in real applications of multilingual information access based on linguistic engineering. Also a long experience in crosslingual interrogation from the EMIR project in 1990 to industrial applications since the end of the 90s.

Languages that have been introduced in CEA's technologies are : French, English, German (in cooperation with the Textec German company), Russian (With the Sciper French company), Dutch (in cooperation the Belgian ASCII company). Spanish and Italian are on the way. The Arabic language based on CEA's technology (has been developed by a CNRS team which will be our sub-contractor in this project)

The CEA has also a long experience in bilingual dictionary building by corpora processing (terminology extraction and sentence - word alignment in parallel texts.

The CEA will call on the Centre d'Etude des Langues et Littératures du Monde Arabe CELLMA for their expertise in Arabic language processing. (see in Annex the letter of agreement signed by its Director this 14 09 2001)

3 - OIE will provide its experience in Management of environmental data and in databases producing (knowledge management and documentation), in multilingual websites (www.semide.org; www.aquadocinter.org; www.oieau.fr), in production of multilingual media ( INBO letters, News,…) and evaluation of requirements for end users. Thus, OIE will help SYSTRAN for management of the corpus in relation with their role of hosting.

In a first step, ALMA will be hosted on a dedicated website in OIE with at least three portals depending on the origin of end users ( different addresses for the three zones) . Therefore, ALMA will offer a centralized visualisation and monitoring board of the services (request, translation,) with specific tools and surveys, which will measure audience from the different regions. A permanent bilingual Webmaster located in OIE and in relation with a documentalist understanding Arabic language if necessary (see persons in charge in C4) plays the role of animator with daily interactivity. Administration of the platform by software engineers of OIE will be done in relation with SYSTRAN and CEA. This experience of applied administration of the platform by OIE allows disseminating results more easily at the end.

4 - The language technologies laboratory at IRSIT develops NLP computer applications for the Arabic language, including: English-Arabic computer assisted translation, the compiling of bilingual electronic dictionaries, and the development of Arabic lexical and textual databases.

5 -The Information Technology College at AMMAN University is concerned with delivering state of the art in IT, and in setting up high-level standards for producing a high quality students that are capable of handling all aspects of IT in various fields, with exposure to the latest technologies and involvement in real life projects. One of the main areas of research and interest is Natural Language Processing.

These two partners (4 & 5) will be in charge of the Terminological and Arabic analysis development, working in parallel in Tunis, Amman, and at Systran premises where each of them will second one linguist during the whole duration of the ALMA project to be trained in coding and collaborate to creating an Arabic analysis for NLP ( search and translation ).

6 - HYDROCONTROL will provide its experience in managing European networks, creating events for co-operation between Mediterranean and European countries. It will coordinate both the data collection in different countries and its standardisation for data processing use, and manage the evaluation tasks.

7/8 - MASH and ATW will provide their experience in multilingual electronic dictionaries, Arabic lexical databases, text retrieval and language processing. They will contribute effectively to localisation and cultural customisation of the ALMA site, data collection in the Arabic countries and its digitalisation for data processing use.

MWI (Ministry of Water and Irrigation of Jordan) will be associated, not in the consortium, but as users of the platform and websites specially customised for Machreq (see in Annex the letter of interest signed by the Acting Secretary General this 12 09 2001) and will provide:

• The necessary input and feedback on functionalities / interfaces as the project evolves
• An external way of testing products
• An evaluation of possible follow-up projects on a larger scale

One of the very important tasks of the consortium will be to ensure visibility and publicity of the project. This task will be coordinated by OIE, with the active participation of the whole partners, especially MWI in Jordan and MASH in Tunisia.

MWI will assume the relations with the new state secretary of environment created recently in Jordan and the national tourism Office.