The European Language Technology Landscape in 2020: Language-Centric and Human-Centric AI for Cross-Cultural Communication in Multilingual Europe

Georg Rehm (1) , Katrin Marheinecke (1) , Stefanie Hegele (1) , Stelios Piperidis (2) , Kalina Bontcheva (3) , Jan Hajič (4) , Khalid Choukri (5) , Andrejs Vasiļjevs (6) , Gerhard Backfried , Christoph Prinz , José Manuel Gómez Pérez , Luc Meertens (7) , Paul Lukowicz (1) , Josef van Genabith (1) , Andrea Lösch (1) , Philipp Slusallek , Morten Irgens , Patrick Gatellier (8) , Joachim Köhler , Laure Le Bars , Dimitra Anastasiou , Albina Auksoriūtė , Núria Bel , António Branco , Gerhard Budin , Walter Daelemans (9) , Koenraad de Smedt , Radovan Garabík , Maria Gavriilidou , Dagmar Gromann , Svetla Koeva (10) , Simon Krek (11) , Cvetana Krstev (12) , Krister Lindén (13) , Bernardo Magnini (14) , Jan Odijk , Maciej Ogrodniczuk (15) , Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson , Mike Rosner , Bolette Sandford Pedersen , Inguna Skadiņa , Marko Tadić , Dan Tufiş (16) , Tamas Varadi (17) , Kadri Vider , Andy Way (18) , François Yvon (19)

1 DFKI - Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH = German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
2 ILSP - Institute for Language and Speech Processing
3 Department of Computer Sciences [Scheffield]
4 UK - Univerzita Karlova [Praha, Česká republika] = Charles University [Prague, Czech Republic]
5 ELDA - Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency
6 Tilde - Tilde
7 ULB - Université libre de Bruxelles
8 Smart Systems Laboratory, Thales Services S.A.
9 Universiteit Antwerpen = University of Antwerpen [Antwerpen]
10 Department of Computational Linguistics, Institute of Bulgarian,
11 IJS - Jozef Stefan Institute [Ljubljana]
12 université de belgrade
13 Helsingin yliopisto = Helsingfors universitet = University of Helsinki
14 Human Language Technology [Trento]
15 IPI PAN - Instytut Podstaw Informatyki
16 Romanian Academy [IASI]
17 MTA - Hungarian Academy of Sciences
18 DCU - Dublin City University [Dublin]
19 TLP - Traitement du Langage Parlé - LISN

Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe's specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI-including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions-has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

Mots clés: National and international projects; infrastructural issues; policy issues; infrastructures; multilingualism

Domaines: Traitement du texte et du document

Georg Rehm, Katrin Marheinecke, Stefanie Hegele, Stelios Piperidis, Kalina Bontcheva, et al.. The European Language Technology Landscape in 2020: Language-Centric and Human-Centric AI for Cross-Cultural Communication in Multilingual Europe. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, ELDA/ELRA, May 2020, Marseille, France. ⟨hal-02892154⟩