The use case focus meeting, from 1 - 2 February, will be held in Edinburgh. One of TextLink's significant objectives is to facilitate European  multilingualism through the creation a European portal containing that  makes available to a range of potential users, such resources as  annotation tools, search tools, and monolingual and parallel corpora  that have been enriched and made interoperable and co-searchable through annotation of discourse-relational devices and the information they convey.

We need to be able to demonstrate a prototype portal with at least some of these useful properties in the fourth year of the Action, which starts in
May 2017. While the portal will have to be implemented by one or more
researchers who can be supported by our STSM mechanism, in order to be
clear about what specific capabilities the prototype will support, we need
to lay out a small set of "use cases" that can be demonstrated using
existing resources, or resources that would be available by Spring 2017.

We began to gather suggestions that could be developed into "use cases"  at our April meeting in Budapest, during the Focus Group discussion devoted  to the Portal. They include being able to search a monolingual corpus for  a particular connective (i.e., a particular lexical/phrasal form) or for  all connectives realizing a particular relation in context; finding all translations of a given connective in a parallel corpus; finding all tokens
in a parallel corpus which a particular relation has been "explicitated" (i.e., rendered explicit in the target text, when implicit in the source)
or, conversely, "implicitated'"; producing statistics on connective use in a particular genre (based on either a monolingual corpus or comparable
corpora in multiple languages), etc.

To flesh out a small set of these into full "use cases'", we will hold a small TextLink meeting in Edinburgh on Wednesday-Thursday, 1-2 Feb 2017,
prior to the annual Steering Group and MC meetings to be
held on Friday, 3 February.

If you would like to attend this meeting and contribute to this effort, please reply to Bonnie Webber by 10 December indicating: 

• what type of TextLink portal "use case" you can contribute to; 
• what resources the "use case" would involve; 
• what skills and/or background you can contribute to the design of
  "use cases". 

We will respond to your request by 20 December.

The portal should be of great benefit to TextLink and its members and
should also be an aid to raising funds for further work on Discourse
Relational Devices.

We hope that you will be willing and able to contribute.