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Experiences of Language Engineering Algorithm Reuse

Traditionally, the level of reusability of language processing resources within the research community has been very low. Most of the recycling of linguistic resources has been concerned with reuse of data, e.g., corpora, lexica, and grammars, while the algorithmic resources far too seldom have been shared between di˙erent projects and institutions. As a consequence, researchers who are willing to reuse somebody else's processing components have been forced to invest major e˙orts into issues of integration, inter-process communication, and interface design. In this paper, we discuss the experiences drawn from the svensk project regarding the issues on reusability of language engineering software as well as some of the challenges for the research community which are prompted by them. Their main characteristics can be laid out along three dimensions; technical/software challenges, linguistic challenges, and `political' challenges. In the end, the unavoidable conclusion is that it de˝nitely is time to bring more aspects of engineering into the Computational Linguistic community!