Infrastructure for standardization of Asian language resources

As an area of great linguistic and cultural diversity, Asian language resources have received much less attention than their western counterparts. Creating a common standard for Asian language resources that is compatible with an international standard has at least three strong advantages: to increase the competitive edge of Asian countries, to bring Asian countries to closer to their western counterparts, and to bring more cohesion among Asian countries. To achieve this goal, we have launched a two year project to create a common standard for Asian language resources. The project is comprised of four research items, (1) building a description framework of lexical entries, (2) building sample lexicons, (3) building an upper-layer ontology and (4) evaluating the proposed framework through an application. This paper outlines the project in terms of its aim and approach.