A decade of HLT Agency activities in the Low Countries: from resource maintenance (BLARK) to service offerings (BLAISE)

AbstractIn this paper we report on the Flemish-Dutch Agency for Human Language Technologies (HLT Agency or TST-Centrale in Dutch) in the Low Countries. We present its activities in its first decade of existence. The main goal of the HLT Agency is to ensure the sustainability of linguistic resources for Dutch. 10 years after its inception, the HLT Agency faces new challenges and opportunities. An important contextual factor is the rise of the infrastructure networks and proliferation of resource centres. We summarise some lessons learnt and we propose as future work to define and build for Dutch (which by extension can apply to any national language) a set of Basic LAnguage Infrastructure SErvices (BLAISE). As a conclusion, we state that the HLT Agency, also by its peculiar institutional status, has fulfilled and still is fulfilling an important role in maintaining Dutch as a digitally fully fledged functional language.