Open Grey for Language Technology: a ride on the network

The aim of this paper is to introduce the Open Access movement for Natural Language Processing (NLP) by means of a wide range of open access Grey Literature documentation available on the web. In 2008 Robert Dale, in the last issue of volume 35 of Computational Linguistics said: "There are a number of definitions of the term 'open access' in circulation, but almost all share the key principle that scientific literature should be freely available for all to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with appropriate attribution) without restriction". At first glance it might seem that the Open Access movement has gradually become more influential in the field of language technology by building repositories accessible through the network. Today's digital archives are niches of intellectual production spread by means of a wide range of documents (such as journal articles and proceedings) which, paradoxically, the search engines do not always reach. The use of inappropriate terms in the formulation of queries and the fragmentation of repositories in this area of investigation does not allow to retrieve information on a large scale. The full paper, after a first introductory section, will be organized in two sections: 1) the first dedicated to the methodology for searching and tracing open access resources and to the criteria for analyzing and selecting the online documentation; 2) the second devoted to a description of the state-of-the-art of Open Access Grey Literature material in a statistical and thematic scenario. As things stand, standardization of computational systems interconnected by links and tools of various nature allowing Internet users to easily retrieve the information that the web naturally makes available would then be essential. Topics: Sustainability, Public Accessible Resources, Product and Service enhancements, Open Access, Curation and Preservation