Co-funded by the 7th Framework Programme and the ICT Policy Support Programme of the European Commission through the contracts T4ME, CESAR, METANET4U, META-NORD (grant agreements no. 249119, 271022, 270893, 270899). Language Technology for Multilingual Europe: Current State and Future Plans Georg Rehm Network Manager META-NET German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin, Germany European Languages in the Age of Technology: Quo vadis? – Vilnius, Lithuania November 14, 2012
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Language Technology for Multilingual Europe: Current State and Future Plans
Georg Rehm. Language Technology for Multilingual Europe: Current State and Future Plans. European Languages in the Digital Age: quo vadis?, Vilnius, Lithuania, November 2012. November 14, 2012. Invited talk.
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Co-funded by the 7th Framework Programme and the ICT Policy Support Programme of the European Commission through the contracts T4ME, CESAR, METANET4U, META-NORD (grant agreements no. 249119, 271022, 270893, 270899).
Language Technology for Multilingual Europe: Current State and Future Plans
Georg Rehm
Network Manager META-NET German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin, Germany
European Languages in the Age of Technology: Quo vadis? – Vilnius, Lithuania
November 14, 2012
Outline
q Introduction
q Language White Paper Series
q Strategic Research Agenda
q Conclusions
http://www.meta-net.eu 2
Multilingual Europe
3 http://www.meta-net.eu
q Challenge: Providing each language community with the most advanced technologies for communication and information so that maintaining their mother tongue does not turn into a disadvantage.
q While research has made considerable progress in recent years, the pace of progress is not fast enough to meet the challenge within the next 10-20 years.
q All stakeholders – researchers, LT user and provider industries, language communities, funding programmes, policy makers – should team up for a major dedicated push.
Objectives
META-NET is a network of excellence dedicated to fostering the tech-nological foundations of the European multilingual information society.
➔ LT research on European languages, except for English, is too weak and too slow
➔ Many languages are badly covered
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
450
English
Ch
inese
Germ
an, Stand
ard
Fren
ch
Spanish
Japane
se
Arabic
Dutch
Portugue
se
Czech
Danish
Swed
ish
Hind
i Ko
rean
Turkish
Ita
lian
Russian
Finn
ish
Hebrew
Hu
ngarian
Sloven
e Urdu
Romanian
Zulu
Bulgarian
Catalan-‐Va
lencian-‐Ba
lear
Greek
Thai
Welsh
Estonian
Basque
Ge
rman, Swiss
InukStut
Indo
nesia
n Ineseñ
o LaSn
Marathi
Malay
Pushto
Serbian
Syria
c Tamil
UgariS
c Ukrainian
Uspanteko
Vietnamese
Languages treated in the 2010 editions of Journal of Computational Linguistics and Conferences of ACL, EMNLP and COLING. Many European languages without any reference: Slovak, Maltese, Lithuanian, Irish, Albanian, Croatian, Galician etc.
Key Observations
http://www.meta-net.eu 13
q When it comes to Language Technology support, there are massive differences between Europe’s languages and technology areas.
q LT support for English is ahead of any other language.
q Even support for English is far from being perfect.
q The gap between English and the other languages keeps widening!
q Several languages – Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese – receive this weakest score in all four areas!
q At least 21 European languages in danger of digital extinction!(Languages put into the “weak or no support” category at least once.)
White Paper Press Campaign
q Headline of press release:
At Least 21 European Languages in Danger of Digital Extinction. Good News and Bad News on the European Day of Languages.
q Sent out to journalists, politicians and other stakeholder groups before the European Day of Languages (September 26).
q Overwhelmed by the huge interest in the topic and our key findings!
q 520+ mentions in the online and traditional press.
q 40+ interviews with META-NET representatives (television, radio).
q News came in from 41 countries in 35 different languages.
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