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The problem area

Academic research groups that have developed parsers and lexica are unable to sell these as products and market them. Such resources may have cost many manyears for their development, but that does not mean anyone is willing to pay the same price to obtain them. Furthermore, being academics they are not in a position to offer maintenance.

There are a number of repositories of linguistic resources, but they are either proprietary or they make the resources available at a low price for research purposes only, while the conditions for commercial use are very vague (write us). The low price hardly covers the cost of distribution and certainly is not enough to cover maintenance. The gold wagon is expected to come in from industry.

As a consequence, in building NLP applications many industrial corporations prefer to develop their own resources from scratch rather than being dependent on others. Research whose results might become economically interesting can not be based on such resources.

In fact, the situation is remarkably like that for software in the eighties, and the same solution should be considered:

Basic linguistic resources like grammars, lexica, parsers, corpora and ontologies should be made freely available in the public domain, especially if they have been developed with public money. Their users should be invited to contribute improvements, thus enabling a low-cost form of maintenance.
Where have we heard this before?


next up previous
Next: AGFL under GPL Up: The AGFL Grammar Work Previous: Introduction
Kees Koster
2002-05-01