The news of the discontinuation of SDU’s language technology activities came as a big shock to me, at a time when the European Union is actively fostering open access in R&D and the use of European products, of which VISLcg is one of the top examples in the language technology field. • VISLcg is an extremely powerful tool which I use in my research and for providing annotated corpora to the community of computational processing of Portuguese through Linguateca. • It has also been used in my teaching at the University of Oslo, both BA and MA, for the last ten years, and it is installed at the Norwegian HPC cluster. • Recent venues where VISLcg has been essential is in the PhD dissertation of Bárbara Ramos, which I co-supervised at PUC-Rio, Brazil; the building of ELTeC-por (the Portuguese part of the European Literary Text Collection); and the DIP challenge (a shared task for identifying characters in Portuguese literature),see https://www.linguateca.pt/DIP) For me it is almost inconceivable to lose access to this open-source resource. It will seriously damage R&D in Portuguese, and it will also bring to an end the teaching setup built around it. Sincerely, Diana Santos Full Professor, Portuguese language, University of Oslo Leader of Linguateca, an international resource project for Portuguese
Detmar Meurers <[email protected]> escreveu no dia segunda, 8/05/2023 à(s) 21:58: > Dear Eckhard, dear Tino, > > at a time when language technology such as ChatGPT is receiving more > public attention than ever, so aptly highlighting the importance of > language data as a reflection of our world(s), the idea to close down > a language technology group conveys an absurd lack of understanding, > which we must speak up against. > > Especially also considering the fact that for lower resource languages > (i.e. the vast majority of languages) a brute force approach relying > solely on vast corpus data is not an option, the tools you have > developed and supported are crucial building blocks for these > languages and the European multilangual mission. Just today, Mikel > Iruskieta and I were talking about CG3-based analyses of Basque for > research and tool development targeting readability analysis and > language proficiency classification. > > In what form do you plan to document the support - are you collecting > official letters on letterhead as pdfs? And if you haven't already > done so, sending a message to a more widely read list may be useful to > whip up the tsunami of support that your language technology group > deserves. > > All the best, > Detmar > > > On Mon, May 08, 2023 at 12:45:34PM +0200, 'Eckhard Bick' via Constraint > Grammar wrote: > > !-------------------------------------------------------------------| > > This Message Is From an External Sender > > This message came from outside your organization. > > |-------------------------------------------------------------------! > > > > Dear all, > > > > Motivated by politically forced downsizing requirements, SDU has decided > to > > close entire sections of its research and teaching activities. > Specifically, > > the Department of Language, Culture, History and Communication has > decided > > to discontinue its language technology activities, which concerns the > > infrastructure and people behind VISL, Corpuseye and CG-based research. > > > > If you think this infrastructure is important and should be maintained > > despite the university's financial situation, please send us a support > mail. > > Especially if you have personal or institutional arguments for doing so > as a > > user. > > > > We will collect your mails and use them to influence the decision makers. > > > > Best, > > > > Eckhard Bick & Tino Didriksen > > > > > > > > > > -- > > Eckhard Bick, > > cand.med., dr.phil. > > University of Southern Denmark > > e-mail: [email protected] > > web: > https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://beta.visl.sdu.dk__;!!KGKeukY!3g-PJSa-l0KPLVJv2FbmtXL7RGh7g2q_vGxEKP2qimPhDN3UmpcCHsa0nw9WMw0D6Qs8IqC_wYiNK3a0pLupVvDsh0ln_715pu9j$ > > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Constraint Grammar" group. > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to [email protected]. > > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/constraint-grammar/6afe14e8-3044-0e3d-7070-b23a387231cf*40mail.dk__;JQ!!KGKeukY!3g-PJSa-l0KPLVJv2FbmtXL7RGh7g2q_vGxEKP2qimPhDN3UmpcCHsa0nw9WMw0D6Qs8IqC_wYiNK3a0pLupVvDsh0ln_yh1ELFt$ > . > > -- > -- > Prof. Dr. Detmar Meurers http://purl.org/dm > Dept. of Linguistics - LEAD Graduate School - SFB 833 - Univ. Tübingen > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Constraint Grammar" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/constraint-grammar/20230508192656.o22zre5e3r4l45qj%40sfs.uni-tuebingen.de > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Constraint Grammar" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/constraint-grammar/CADK-w23zs-EhRHUncrK78YZhWg%2BVWx-iLczemtoqxUM%2Bbq-4MA%40mail.gmail.com.
