1. Motivation
In recent years, the Internet has developed rapidly, leading to an explosion in
the amount of
information that one can obtain. However, having too much information is a
problem in itself, making it
very difficult to find particular information which was previously produced by
another researcher.
General-purpose search engines are often too crude or require too much specific
knowledge to
effectively locate the sought information.
Given that general-purpose tools are not sufficient for researchers,
specifically designed search
tools should be used instead. The purpose of this project is to build a system
that will enable
researchers to easily locate the resource they require. Here, a resource may be
a program which
performs a certain task, a corpus with certain characteristics, the
transcription of a speech, etc.
Researchers who cannot locate a resource are often forced to recreate it,
resulting in a significant
waste of time and effort. This waste could be avoided if there was a
comprehensive list available of
existing resources. Such lists can be built by hand from announcements on
mailing lists, but this is a
tedious process which often leads to incomplete lists.
The first implementation of the system will be tuned to the field of
computational linguistics
because we are most familiar with this area, but we are confident that this
will not restrict the
generality of the system, and it will be applicable to any domain with minimal
changes.
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