Building Multilingual Terminological Lexicons for Less Widely Available Languages

Availability of Linguistic Resources for the development of Human Language Technology applications is nowadays recognized as a critical issue with both political and economic impact and implications on the sphere of cultural identity. This paper reports about the experience gained during the INTERA European project for the production of multilingual terminological lexicons for less widely available languages, i.e. those languages that suffer from poor representation over the net and from scarce computational resources, but yet are requested by the market. It discusses the procedure followed within the project, focuses on the problems faced which had an impact on the initial goals, presents the necessary modifications that resulted from these problems, evaluates the market needs as attested by various surveys, and describes the methodology that is proposed for the efficient production of Multilingual Terminological Lexicons.