UNL Panel

The Universal Networking Language (UNL) is a knowledge representation language that has been used in several different fields of natural language processing, such as machine translation, multilingual document generation, summarization, information retrieval and extraction, sentiment analysis and semantic reasoning. It was proposed by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1996, and has been promoted by the UNDL Foundation, in Geneva, Switzerland, under a mandate of the United Nations, since 2000.

Originally designed more than 15 years ago, the UNL has not escaped from the action of time and has not incorporated yet several recent advances in the domain of natural language processing. In order to prepare the ground for the necessary updates to the present specifications, the UNDL Foundation set the UNL Panel initiative and proposes a three-chapter dialogue with the UNL community and other researchers. In each chapter, the UNDL Foundation will invite specialists, from inside and outside the UNL Community, to present their positions and views about technical issues concerning the UNL. The first meeting will be dedicated to the Universal Words, the second will focus on relations and attributes, and the third will be devoted to the UNL document structure.

Goals

The main purpose of the UNL Panel is to collect the opinion of specialists, from inside and outside the UNL Community, about the desirable structure, nature and role of the elements of the UNL, as to prepare the ground for an in-depth revision of the current specifications.

In order to organize this discussion, the UNDL Foundation divided the subjects into three chapters, to be addressed in three different meetings:

• Universal Words (the set, the notation and the properties of UWs);
• Relations and attributes (the set, the notation and the properties of relations and attributes);
• UNL document structure (format, encoding, schema and validation).

Editions

• I UNL Panel: Universal Words
• II UNL Panel: Relations and Attributes
• III UNL Panel: UNL Document Structure