Towards digital linguistic justice in Europe by 2030
Cultural and linguistic diversity are important attributes of European integration. The European Union operates in 24 official languages, but the total number of languages spoken on the continent, including regional languages, is over 60.
„The digital single market aimed for by the EU can only become a reality through the use of language technology," believes Dr. Georg Rehm, DFKI Research Fellow and coordinator of the EU project European Language Grid(ELG). "However, the European language technology industry is very heterogeneous. It consists of hundreds of small and medium-sized enterprises and a few large companies. It is fragmented by country, language, industry and sector. This represents a significant hurdle for the deployment of language technology in the European digital single market and ultimately its success. In addition, for some European languages there are few or no language technologies available. These languages are therefore threatened by digital extinction," the DFKI researcher emphasizes.
The cloud platform European Language Grid
Headed by DFKI, this is where the EU project comes in. The project develops and implements the scalable cloud platform European Language Grid which provides access to hundreds of commercial and non-commercial language technologies for all European languages, including applications, services, data sets and resources.
The commercial and non-commercial European language technology community will thus be able to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets on the platform, share them over the network and link them to other resources. The European Language Grid will thus make a major contribution to enabling a cross-lingual European digital single market, creating new jobs and new markets.
The European Language Grid promotes European language technologies for a unified Europe, tailored to ourlanguages and cultures and to our social and economic needs, for the benefit of European citizens, society, innovation and industry.The ELG is linked to European AI activities. There are close links and exchanges with ELRC, the European Language Resource Coordination, the European AI network HumanE-AI-Net, and CLAIRE, the Confederation ofLaboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe.
META-FORUM 2020
The new version of the European Language Grid will be presented at this year's conference, which is being heldonline due to the pandemic. In addition, the first ten pilot projects will be demonstrated. European languagetechnology companies and research institutions will present their current projects in a virtual exhibition.