[EN] Steven Krauwer (Utrecht, Netherlands)
#Coordinator of ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language
Technologies)
ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies) has 135
European academic and industrial institutions as members. The long-term
technological goal which unites the participants of ELSNET is to build
multilingual speech and NL (natural language) systems with unrestricted coverage
of both spoken and written language. It is funded by the European Commission.
Steven Krauwer, coordinator of ELSNET, is a senior lecturer/researcher in
Computational Linguistics at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (Utrecht
University, Netherlands). His main interests are: machine translation;
evaluation of language and speech systems; integration of language, speech and
other modalities.
[Interview 23/09/1998 // Interview 04/08/1999 // Interview 06/01/2001]
*Interview of September 23, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
It's my chief way of communicating with others and my main source of
information. I'm sure I'll spend the rest of my professional life trying to use
it to remove or at least lower the language barriers.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
As a European citizen, I think multilingualism on the Web is absolutely
essential, because in the long run I don't think it's a healthy situation when
only those who have a reasonable command of English can take full advantage of
what the Web has to offer.
As a researcher (specialized in machine translation), I see multilingualism as a
major challenge: how can we ensure that all information on the Web is accessible
to everybody, irrespective of language differences.
*Interview of August 4, 1999
= What has happened since our first interview?
I've become more and more convinced we should be careful not to address the
multilinguality problem in isolation. I've just returned from a wonderful summer
vacation in France, and even if my knowledge of French is modest (to put it
mildly), it's surprising to see that I still manage to communicate successfully
by combining my poor French with gestures, facial expressions, visual clues and
diagrams. I think the Web (as opposed to old-fashioned text-only email) offers
excellent opportunities to exploit the fact that transmission of information via
different channels (or modalities) can still work, even if the process is only
partially successful for each of the channels in isolation.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
The baseline is of course "thou shalt not steal, even if it's easy". It's
interesting to note that, however complex it is to define legally, most people
have very good intuition about what counts as stealing:
- if I copy info from the Web and use it for my own purposes, I'm not stealing,
because this is exactly why the information was put on the Web in the first
place;
- if I copy info from the Web and re-transmit it to others, giving credit to the
author, I am not stealing;
- if I copy info from the Web and re-transmit it to others, pretending I'm the
author, I am stealing;
- if I copy info from the Web and sell it to others without permission from the
author, I am stealing.
I realize there are lots of borderline cases where it's not immediately clear
what counts as stealing, but let's leave that to the lawyers to figure out.
= What practical solutions would you suggest?