Towards a Standard for a Multilingual Lexical Entry: The EAGLES/ISLE Initiative

ISLE, a transatlantic standard oriented initiative supported by EC and NSF under the Human Language Technology (HLT) programme, is a continuation of the long standing EAGLES initiative. The objective is to develop widely agreed and urgently demanded standards and guidelines for infrastructural language resources, tools, and HLT products. ISLE targets the areas of multilingual computational lexicons, natural interaction and multimodality, and evaluation. We describe the preliminary guidelines of a standard framework for multilingual computational lexicons, based on a general schema for the "Multilingual ISLE Lexical Entry" (MILE). The needs and features of existing Machine Translation systems provide the main reference points for the process of consensual definition of the MILE. We also provide a brief description of the EU SIMPLE semantic lexicons, built on the basis of previous EAGLES recommendations and now enlarged to real-size lexicons within national projects, thus creating a large infrastructural platform of harmonised lexicons in Europe. EAGLES previous results have already become de facto widely adopted standards, and EAGLES itself is a well-known trademark and point of reference for HLT projects and products.