New Directions for Language Resource Development and Distribution.

Despite the growth in the number of linguistic data centers around the world, their accomplishments and expansions and the advances they have help enable, the language resources that exist are a small fraction of those required to meet the goals of Human Language Technologies (HLT) for the world's languages and the promises they offer: broad access to knowledge, direct communication across language boundaries and engagement in a global community. Using the Linguistic Data Consortium as a focus case, this paper sketches the progress of data centers, summarizes recent activities and then turns to several issues that have received inadequate attention and proposes some new approaches to their resolution.