[Corpora-List] Call for Participation in the UNL Programme

[Lucia Specia]

Please distribute, and apologies for multiple postings

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION IN THE UNL PROGRAMME
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The UNDL Foundation (UNDLF) is seeking students, translators, interpreters
and language specialists to join the global effort of creating language
resources for the UNL Programme. Selected candidates will be accredited to
work in providing dictionary entries for the projects and the languages
hosted by the UNDLF, either as freelancers, or as volunteers, depending on
the projects and on the languages. Tasks are distributed upon availability
and will be carried out in a distance-working environment through a specific
web interface. Candidates are not required to have any previous experience
in natural language processing but are expected to have some acquaintance
with descriptive Linguistics and a good knowledge of English. Undergraduate
students of Language Studies and Translation Studies from all over the world
are especially welcomed.

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Sponsored project and languages

For the time being, the UNDL Foundation will remunerate only entries created
for the project UNL MIR for the following languages:

    * Chinese (Standard Mandarin in Simplified Chinese)
    * French
    * French Sign Language
    * German
    * Hindi
    * Japanese
    * Brazilian Portuguese
    * Russian
    * Spanish
    * Swahili

Entries will be paid through the PayPal system according to the rates
indicated below.

Entries created for other projects and for other languages are not being
remunerated for the moment but are equally welcomed, as new languages and
projects may be granted in the future. In any case, the UNDL Foundation will
issue a certificate of participation for anyone who achieve at least 1,000
UNLdots in the period of three months from the date of enrolment, regardless
of the language or the project.

Due to special funds, Arabic, Armenian and English have also been addressed,
but are not being remunerated by the UNLdots system.

The UNL MIR project aims at creating a core dictionary to be used in natural
language processing.

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Instructions

Candidates must register in the UNLweb (http://www.unlweb.net), and pursue
the CLEA450 certificate issued by VALERIE, the Virtual Learning Environment
for UNL. CLEA (Certificate of Language Engineering Aptitude) is a free
certification in language description that introduces some of the UNDLF
standards for language engineering. Approved candidates will be accredited
to work within the UNLarium, a database management system used to provide
dictionary entries for projects hosted by the UNDLF.

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UNLdots

UNLdot is a unit of time and complexity for measuring the effort spent in
performing UNLarium-related tasks. UNLdots are used not only for calculating
how long it takes to create dictionary entries and grammar rules, but also
to evaluate the expertise of a given contributor. For the time being, each
new dictionary entry or grammar rule corresponds to 1 (one) UNLdot. The
rates for UNLdots vary according to the expertise. The current values are
the following:

LEVEL = RATE (1 UNLdot)
A0 (below 5,000 UNLdots) = USD 0.25
A1 (5,001 to 15,000 UNLdots) = USD 0.50
A2 (15,000 to 30,000 UNLdots) =	USD 0.60
B1 (30,001 to 50,000 UNLdots) =	USD 0.70
B2 (50,001 to 75,000 UNLdots) = USD 0.80
C1 (75,001 to 100,000 UNLdots) = USD 0.90
C2 (above 100,001 UNLdots) = USD 1.00

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Further information

For further information please contact:

Ronaldo MARTINS
Language Resources Manager
UNDL Foundation
48, route de Chancy
CH-1213 - Geneva - Switzerland
+41 22 879 8090
r.martins at undlfoundation.org

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About

The UNDL Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Geneva,
Switzerland, which has received, from the United Nations, the mandate for
implementing the Universal Networking Language (UNL). The UNL is a knowledge
representation language that has been used for several different tasks in
natural language engineering, such as machine translation, multilingual
document generation, summarization, information retrieval and semantic
reasoning. It has been, since 1996, a unique initiative to reduce language
barriers and strengthen cross-cultural communication in the framework of the
UN.

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