Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch

Dr. Peter Spyns works for the Flemish Department of Economy, Science and Innovation on innovation policy preparation, including human language technology and digital heritage. He is part-time seconded to the Dutch Language Union where he coordinated the STEVIN programme, supervises the HLT Agency, and participates in CLARIN-ERIC committees. Previously, he worked in academia and industry on medical language processing, ontology modelling and dialogue systems. Prof. Dr. Jan Odijk is professor of Language and Speech Technology at Utrecht University. Previously, he worked more than 23 years in language and speech technology industry, both in the Netherlands and in Flanders. His current research focuses on infrastructures for humanities researchers that include language and speech technology services.

• Foreword. by Linde van den Bosch.- Introduction.- Peter Spyns.- Part I. How it started.- 2.The STEVIN Programme: Result of Five Years Cross-Border HLT for Dutch Policy Preparation. P.Spyns and E.D’Halleweyn.- Part II. HLT Resource-project Related Papers.- 3.The JASMIN Speech Corpus: Recordings of Children, Non-Natives and Elderly People. C. Cucchiarini and H. Van Hamme.- 4.Resources Developed in the Autonomata Projects. H.van den Heuvel, J-P.Martens, G.Bloothooft, M.Schraagen, N.Konings, K.D’hanens, and Q.Yang.- 5.STEVIN can Praat. D.Weenink.- 6.SPRAAK: Speech Processing, Recognition and Automatic Annotation Kit. P.Wambacq, K.Demuynck, and D.Van Compernolle.- 7.COREA: Coreference Resolution for Extracting Answers for Dutch. I.Hendrickx, G.Bouma, W.Daelemans and V.Hoste.- 8.Automatic Tree Matching for Analysing Semantic Similarity in Comparable Text. E.Marsi and E.Krahmer.- 9.Large Scale Syntactic Annotation of Written Dutch: Lassy. G.van Noord, G.Bouma, F.van Eynde, D.de Kok, J.van der Linde, I.Schuurman, E.Tjong Kim Sang, and V.Vandeghinste.- 10.Cornetto: a Combinatorial Lexical Semantic Database for Dutch. P.Vossen, I.Maks, R.Segers, H.van der Vliet, M-F.Moens, K.Hofmann, E.Tjong Kim Sang, and M.de Rijke.- 11.Dutch Parallel Corpus: a Balanced Parallel Corpus for Dutch-English and Dutch-French. H.Paulusen, L.Macken, W.Vandeweghe, and P.Desmet.- 12.Identification and Lexical Representation of Multiword Expressions. J.Odijk.- 13.The Construction of a 500-million-word Reference Corpus of Contemporary Written Dutch. N.Oostdijk, M.Reynaert, V.Hoste, and I.Schuurman.- Part III. HLT Technology Related Papers.- 14.Lexical Modeling for Proper Name Recognition in Autonomata Too.- B.Réveil, J-P.Martens, H.van den Heuvel, G.Bloothooft, and M.Schraagen.- 15.N-Best 2008: a Benchmark Evaluation for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition in Dutch. D.A. van Leeuwen.- 16.Missing Data Solutions for Robust Speech Recognition. Y.Wang, J.F.Gemmeke, K.Demuynck, and H.Van Hamme.- 17.Parse and Corpus-based Machine Translation. V.Vandeghinste, S.Martens, G.Kotzé, J.Tiedemann, J.Van den Bogaert, K.De Smet, F.Van Eynde, and G.van Noord.- Part IV.HLT Application Related Papers.- 18.Development and Integration of Speech technology into COurseware for Language Learning: the DISCO Project. H. Strik, J. van Doremalen, J. Colpaert, and C. Cucchiarini.- 19.Question Answering of Informative Web Pages: How Summarisation Technology Helps. J.De Belder, D.de Kok, G.van Noord, F.Nauze, L.van der Beek, and M-F.Moens.- 20.Generating, Refining and Using Sentiment Lexicons. M.de Rijke, V.Jijkoun, F.Laan, W.Weerkamp, P.Ackermans, and G.Geleijnse.- Part V. And now.- 21.The Dutch-Flemish HLT Agency: Managing the Lifecycle of STEVIN’s Language Resources. R.van Veenendaal, L.van Eerten, C.Cucchiarini, andP.Spyns.- 22.Conclusions and Outlook to the Future. Jan Odijk.​

From the book reviews: "The book offers an impressive documentation of transnational joint research and development in language and speech technology from the past decade, that has been characterized by international reviewers as a front-running, exemplary effort. ... it is a must-read for prospective BLARK developers, HLT resource centers, and language unions everywhere ... ." (Antal van den Bosch, Machine Translation, Vol. 28, 2014)