The Turkish Natural Language Processing Initiative is supported by a 5-year grant from the NATO Science for Stability Program, beginning 1994. The project is being carried out by Middle East Technical University , Bilkent University, and Halici Computing.
The Project Director is Kemal Oflazer . Principal investigators are Kemal Oflazer and Cem Bozsahin. Site directors are Kemal Oflazer (Bilkent site), Cem Bozsahin (METU site), and Nusret Guclu (Halici site). The external advisor for the project is Prof. Jnu-ichi Tsujii, Director of the Centre for Computational Linguistics, at University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).
What follows is a one page summary of the project. More information and the project plan are also available.
The objective of the Turkish Natural Language Processing Initiative project is to develop methods, computer software and other computational resources to perform natural language processing in Turkish. We see human-assisted machine translation (possibly in a limited domain), and Turkish language teaching aids as the most significant applications coming out of this project.
To this end, the project will be conducted in phases. In the first phase, we will establish the necessary computational infrastructure upon which further research and development will be built. In the second phase, we will build language processing tools such as large scale dictionaries, morphological and syntactic analyzers, and sentence generators.
In the third phase, we will concentrate on developing natural language processing products such as translation applications, tools for teaching Turkish, and other research-oriented deliverables.