The UNL Initiative: An Overview

Abstract

We present here a description of the UNL initiative based on the Universal Networking Language (UNL). This language was conceived to support multilingual communication on the Internet across linguistic barriers. This initiative was launched by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University in 1996. The initial consortium was formed to support 15 languages. Eight years later, this initial consortium changed, many components and resources were developed, and the UNL language itself evolved to support different types of applications, from multilingual generation to "knowledge repositories" or cross- lingual information retrieval applications. We describe the main features of this UNL Language, making a comparison with some similar approaches, such as interlinguas. We also describe some organizational and managerial aspects of the UNL according to criteria of quality and maturity, placing emphasis on the fact that the initiative is open to any interested group or researcher. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.