The Language Grid

There is increasing interaction among communities with multiple languages, thus we need tools that can effectively support multilingual communication. The Language Grid is an initiative to build an infrastructure that allows end users to create composite language services for intercultural collaboration. The aim is to support researchers using language resources to create customized multilingual environments to overcome local language barriers, and the stakeholders are the language resource providers, the language service users, and the language grid operators who coordinate the former. This book includes 18 chapters in six parts that summarize various research results and associated development activities on the Language Grid. The chapters in Part I describe the framework of the Language Grid, i.e., service-oriented collective intelligence, used to bridge service providers, service users and service grid operators. Two kinds of software are introduced, the service grid server software and the Language Grid Toolbox, and code for both is available via open source licenses. Part II describes technologies for service workflows that compose atomic language services. Part III reports research work and activities relating to sharing and using language resources. Part IV describes various applications of language services as applicable to intercultural collaboration. Part V contains reports on applying the Language Grid for translation activities, including localization of industrial documents and Wikipedia articles. Finally, Part VI illustrates how the Language Grid can be connected to other service grids, such as DFKI's Heart of Gold and smart classroom services in Tsinghua University in Beijing. The book will be valuable for researchers in artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of machine translation and human-computer interaction.