AnHitz, Development and Integration of Language, Speech and Visual Technologies for Basque

AnHitz is a project promoted by the Basque Government to develop language technologies for the Basque language. The participants in AnHitz are research groups with very different backgrounds: text processing, speech processing and multimedia. The project aims to further develop existing language, speech and visual technologies for Basque: up to now its fruit is a set of 7 different language resources, 9 NLP tools, and 5 applications.. But also, in the last year of this project we are integrating, for the first time, such resources and tools (both existing and generated in the project) into a content management application for Basque with a natural language communication interface. This application consists of a Question Answering and a Cross Lingual Information Retrieval system on the area of Science and Technology. The interaction between the system and the user will be in Basque (the results of the CLIR module that are not in Basque will be translated through Machine Translation) using Speech Synthesis, Automatic Speech Recognition and a Visual Interface. The various resources, technologies and tools that we are developing are already in a very advanced stage, and the implementation of the content management application to integrate them all is in work and is due to be completed by October 2008.