The purpose of this award is to plan and hold a two-day workshop involving representatives from academia, industry, and government to discuss the feasibility of developing a center-based partnership between industry and academia in the area of human language technology (HLT). Although currently this research area does not have such a center, given the success story of Linguistics Data Consortium and the fact that there are many potential industrial partners, the time is ripe to build a better understanding of how to create a center that is not only mutually beneficial, but supports work that simply could not be done by either partner alone. Such collaboration would be important for stimulating research excellence at the university while enhancing the quality of the intellectual property of US HLT companies. The participants are meeting to develop a strategic plan for building a mutually beneficial research center. Generally center vehicles at NSF require strong commitments from industry. This workshop will focus on evaluating the feasibility of building partnerships for two of these programs: Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers and Engineering Research Centers: Partnerships in Transforming Research, Education and Technology. The intellectual merit of the proposed activity is specific to the planning of the workshop. The broader impacts of such a center would be to stimulate HLT research at the university, while enhancing the intellectual property of industrial affiliates.
