Book on European Language Grid published

The European Language Technology (LT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) community is quite extensive, with hundreds of commercial and academic organisations working on a large and heterogeneous set of technologies. However, it is also extremely fragmented with many community members operating only in narrow niches and limited regions, on very specific topics and quite often only considering few regionally confined languages. 
 
Against the background of recent scientific breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning, not only the area of Language Technology but also the vision of a joint European Language Technology Platform gain more and more relevance. Developing such a joint platform was a crucial recommendation in the resolution “Language equality in the digital age”, which was adopted by the European Parliament in a landslide vote in 2018. In January 2019, the EU-funded project European Language Grid (ELG) started with the overarching goal of establishing ELG as the primary Language Technology platform and marketplace in Europe. 
 
The ELG project ran for three and a half years and was completed successfully in June 2022. The  book “European Language Grid – A Language Technology Platform for Multilingual Europe” is now available from scientific publisher Springer in the series “Cognitive Technologies”. The volume was edited by project coordinator Prof. Georg Rehm (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI).  
 
The book documents the evolution and the results of the ELG project, and it describes the architecture and implementation of the ELG LT and NLP cloud platform. Moreover, the reader learns more about the constantly growing ELG community, consisting of hundreds of industrial and academic stakeholders all over Europe as well as about the planned future of the ELG platform after the end of the project runtime. 
 
 “It was nothing but a pleasure to act as Coordinator of the European Language Grid project and to work together with such a strong and dedicated team. Our original plan in this Innovation Action was quite ambitious yet we managed to exceed our joint expectations in terms of the technology platform and its features. The services and resources developed, collected and ingested into the platform, the acceptance and feedback by the community and the various collaborations we conducted with other projects make the ELG project an outstanding success”, says editor and project coordinator Georg Rehm and concludes: “This book is the definitive documentation of the EU project European Language Grid.” 
 
The book is Open Access, i.e., it can be downloaded free of charge. Hard copies are available for purchase. 
 
About the book: 
Title: European Language Grid – A Language Technology Platform for Multilingual Europe 
Editor: Georg Rehm 
Access: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17258-8 
Publisher: Springer  
Book ISBN: 978-3-031-17260-1 
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-17258-8 
Number of Pages: 360