I'm on my way to Tokyo for LKR2004, an "International Symposium on Large-scale Knowledge Resources." The background is the " 21st Century COE (Center of Excellence) Program" of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology (MEXT), which provides about ¥18B in special funding to 113 research programs at 50 Japanese universities. One of these programs is centered at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and is entitled "Framework for Systematization and Application of Large-scale Knowledge Resources".
According to a paper by Prof. Sadaoki Furui, the program leader,
This project will conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary research combining humanities and technology to build the framework for systematization and application of large-scale knowledge resources in electronic forms. Spontaneous speech, written language, materials for e-learning and multimedia teaching, classical literature, historical documents, and information on cultural properties will be targeted as examples of actual knowledge resources. They will be systematized based on a structure of their meanings.
I'll try to post some notes from the symposium if I can get internet access, but my blogging is likely to be light until I get back, a week from now. I expect that my fellow language loggers will pick up the slack, or you can read some of our fine vintage posts.
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 5, 2004 06:41 PM