[HLT Evaluation Portal]

Introduction
- What is HLT evaluation?
  HLT Evaluation is a general endeavour to make judgements about the validity of language and speech technology.
- Why is Evaluation important?
  Evaluation is a fundamental part of the development of HLT products.
- How to evaluate?
  The overall process of evaluation is the same whether comparing different systems or judging a single candidate system.

HLT Evaluations
- Machine Translation
  Machine Translation technologies convert text from a source language (L1) into a target langue (L2).
- Multilingual text alignment
  Multilingual texts alignment consists in identifying correspondences between different text units, e.g., words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. in parallel texts.
- Parsing
  Parsing is the process of structuring a linear representation in accordance with a given grammar.
- Information extraction
  Information Extraction is a technology which extracts pieces of information that are salient to the user’s needs. The kinds of information that systems extract vary in detail and reliability: named entities, attributes, facts and events.
- Information Retrieval
  Information Retrieval deals with the representation, storage, organization of, and access to information items. The representation and organisation of the information items should provide the user with easy access to the information in which he is interested.
- Text Summarization
  The goal of automatic summarization is to extract and present the most important content to the user from an information source.
- Speech-to-Speech Translation
  The goal of the Speech-to-Speech Translation is to enable real-time, interpersonal communication via natural spoken language for people who do not share a common language.
- Speech Recognition
  Speech recognition, also known as automated speech recognition (ASR) or speech-to-text (STT) is a process by which a program or a system transcribes an acoustic speech signal to text.
- Speech Synthesis
  Speech Synthesis programs aim to produce synthetic speech output for a given text.
- Multimodal interface technologies
  Combination of speech, image and video technologies which allows human computer interaction with an intuitive mix of voice, gesture, speech, gaze and body motion.
- Voice User Interface
  Voice User Interfaces (VUI) enable interactions between human and machine by using speech technologies such as speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition (ASR).

Projects that focused on the evaluation of different language technologies.

Text processing	Speech processing	Mutimodal interface
Information Retrieval	Speech Synthesis	Biometrics
Information Extraction	Speech Translation	Multimodal Interface Technologies
Machine Translation	Speech Recognition
Text Summarization	Speech Activity Detection
Parsing	Language Recognition
Multilingual Text Alignment	Speaker Diarization (who spoke when)
Question Answering
Terminology Extraction

HLT Evaluation campaigns

Conferences/Workshops
HLT Evaluation conferences and workshops

Activities by geographical region
- Asia
- Europe
- U.S.

Players
- Evaluation centres
  
  Links to centres which are involved in monitoring the implementation of both European and international HLT evaluation initiatives.
  
  CST CELCT DFKI ELRA ISSCO NIST SSE
- Other institutions/organisations
  Links to various academic institutions, research centres and organisations that are involved in the HLT evaluation activities.
- Evaluation data distributors
- Evaluation data providers

Related sites
- On statistical machine translation