The lack of generic technologies and resources and the wide diversity of formats and specifications has hindered the effective reutilisation of existing resources. In 1993 the EAGLES initiative was launched within the framework of the CEU's DGXIII Linguistic Research and Engineering (LRE) Programme, to accelerate the provision of standards for developing, exploiting and evaluating large-scale language resources. The project is now in its final phase of activities and is currently planning to publish its results as a handbook of agreed working practices and recommendations.
EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards) consists of five Working Groups hosted by designated R&D centres; a Management Board charged with overall co-ordination and supervision and a central support team based at the project co-ordinator site at CPR, Pisa. The Working Groups are made up of experts from European industry and academia, and are concerned with the following five areas: Text Corpora, Computational Lexicons, Grammar Formalisms, Evaluation, Spoken Language. The aims of EAGLES are: