The activities of the EAGLES initiative were distributed over five specialist technical working groups (see Figure 1.1). These working groups were set up in response to the most urgently felt requirements in advanced language engineering: common methodologies for the creation and interchange of electronic language resources such as text and speech corpora, computational lexicons and grammar formalisms, and the evaluation and quality assessment of language processing systems and components. There was also felt to be a need to attempt to reconcile the needs and practices of the speech and language R&D communities.
Figure 1.1: The main structure of the EAGLES Group
The EAGLES Management Board was constituted from member organisations representing European projects in natural language and speech (such as MULTILEX, PLUS, ACQUILEX, NERC, GENELEX, SAM-A , SUNDIAL, EUROLANG, TWB, ONOMASTICA and DELIS) and European associations and coordinating bodies such as ELSNET, ESCA, FOLLI and the European Chapter of the ACL. The Board was chaired by Prof. Rohrer from the University of Stuttgart.
The project funding arrangements were such that, in the early stages, only travel and administrative expenses were covered by the EAGLES initiative. This meant that, whilst some cover was provided by other EU funded projects, the bulk of the costs incurred in the production of this handbook (and the other outputs from the EAGLES initiative) have been met by purely voluntary donations of time and effort on the part of the many contributors involved.