The goals/deliverables of both projects were met or exceeded and the projects have generated a large number of working papers of which over 50% have already been published in refereed journals or conference proceedings. One book has appeared and another is planned. Three workshops involving participants from the IT and dictionary publishing industries and from academia were organised. There are several follow up projects, and ideas and software developed under Acquilex are currently being exploited in several ongoing projects to develop a new generation of lexical databases to support the publication of learners' dictionaries as well as provide more general lexical resources for the language industries.
The overall goals of the project were met or exceeded and several significant follow-ups in the form of continuing research and industrial exploitation are already underway.
Two new European Community projects have been approved for funding under the Luxembourg based
The dictionary publishing industrial partners in Acquilex are exploiting Acquilex developed software and ideas concerning lexical representation in ongoing projects to develop lexical databases to support the production of learners' dictionaries and to provide lexical resources for the language industries in general. The Cambridge Language Survey lexical database at Cambridge University Press was used as the basis for their recently published and well received new learners' dictionary, CIDE. This database is a multi-user commercial dictionary development environment which incorporates many ideas from the prototype Acquilex Lexical Database and Lexical Knowledge Base software. The Cambridge system is available on a commercial basis to other dictionary publishers. If the ideas from Acquilex concerning uniform coding of lexical information and integration of corpus evidence embodied in this system are widely adopted, this could lead to a new generation of commercially developed compatible lexical databases for the community languages.
More than 120 working papers were produced by the two projects and of these over 50% have already been published in refereed conference proceedings or journals, with more in the pipeline. One book has been published and another is planned. This creates a significant research resource which will be accessible to the community (directly or indirectly) via the World Wide Web. The results of the Acquilex projects have been influential in the development of a number of international initiatives and projects, including the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), COMLEX, COMPASS, DELIS, and EAGLES. There are signs that several IT companies are exploiting the results of Acquilex on the basis of this public-domain information; for example, Microsoft (Natural Language Processing group) is making extensive use of machine readable dictionaries in the development of multilingual lexicons for parsing and cite Acquilex publications in their research reports. Several theses have been based on work associated with Acquilex, and many researchers who were employed on Acquilex are now at major commercial and academic centres around the world, further improving the dissemination of results (see Where are they now? for a partial list of ex-Cambridge Computer Laboratory people).
Much Acquilex software is available for third party use and a number of universities and companies are currently utilising project software in their own lexical research and development, including Sharp Laboratories of Europe, Rank Xerox European Research Centre, Apple Computer Inc., British Telecom, France Telecom, Northwestern University, University of the Basque Country, Copenhagen Business School, University of Quebec at Montreal, Brandeis University, University of Edinburgh, and others.