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MULTILINGUALISM IN EUROPE 2020THE HUMAN BEING TO BE REPLACED BY

TECHNOLOGY?

Brussels, 3 December 2010

Hanna Klimek

Directorate-General for Information Society & MediaUnit E.1 “Language Technologies, Machine Translation”

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Human Language Technologies

• teaching computers how to understand & process written & spoken human language

• if you master language, then you can cope with languages– “nickname”: HLT – several terms, communities & specialist groups:

natural language processingspeech technologymachine translationinformation extractioncomputational linguistics…

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Human Language Technologies

• Language – the most complex information medium

• Statistical approach - computers analyse vast collections of texts and derive patterns; data intensive

• Rule-based approach – encoding grammars, vocabulary lists, translation rules; time and labour intensive

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Application areas

• spellchecker• automated translation• search engines• content management systems• car navigation• applications for the handicapped• call centres• …

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Scale of the challenge – some figures

• 60+ languages in Europe and 23 official languages in the EU

• English accounts for 29% of Internet content; English native speakers account for 27% of Internet users...

... but BRIC & other languages are growing much faster

• Users & professionals cannot cope with huge & volatile volumes of Web 2.0 content

“More than 99 percent of what people write, say, or generate never leaves the language in which it was created” (CSA)

• eCommerce: 2/3 of EU customers only buy in their own language

“Europe is still a patchwork of national online markets, and Europeans are prevented from enjoying the benefits of a digital single market.”

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Scale of the challenge – societal aspects

• Many “small” European languages run the risk of becoming victims of the digital age (under-represented and under-resourced online)

• Social inclusion requires substantial language support

• Each language community should have access to advanced technologies for communication, information and knowledge management

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Scale of the challenge – economic aspects

• Huge market opportunities remain untapped

• Digital commercial and cultural content and services need to flow across borders (Digital Agenda for Europe)

• More public investment is needed, especially for languages spoken by small(er) communities, where private investment is unlikely, in order to prevent a new digital divide

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Why bother?

Can’t we leave it to the Big American?

• No,

– one single supplier is never a good idea

– especially one who does not provide an agreed/guaranteed service, and

– holds your (and everybody else’s) data for unknown purposes

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Our role

• promote and support multinational research & innovation projects

• focussing on the digital world, both economy & society

• act as “facilitator” for the dialogue between different communities (research, industry, public bodies)

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A long-term commitment

• EC has supported Language Technologies (LT) since 1980s

• a fresh start since 2008

– renewed political commitment

– explosion of online content, no lingua franca

– promising technical advances

• ~120 M for Research & Innovation in 2009-2011

• ~ 35 projects by early 2012

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Financial instruments

Innovation programme (CIP 2009-10)

– SMEs & less-resourced languages

• pilot projects

– demonstrate the potential of existing technology

– emphasis on service innovation

• No openings at the moment

• 40% of the last call’s budget went to SMEs

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Financial instruments

Research programme (FP7 ICT 2011-12)

– basic & applied research, technology development & field evaluation

– within “Technologies for Digital Content & Languages”

– two calls for project proposals:

Call 7: open, close 18 Jan 2011, 50 M

SME-DCL: open Feb 2011, close Sept 2011, 35M

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ICT Call 7

4.2 Language Technologies

• “… effective multilingual solutions that support business and inter-personal communication and enable people to make sense of online content and services in Europe's many languages.”

– cut time

– reduce cost

– preserve (or even improve) quality

– widen up access

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Objective 4.2 - a closer look

3 project lines

– content processing (outbound)

authoring, translation, (web) publishing

– information access (inbound)

finding, interpreting, categorising …

– natural interaction

with computer systems

• each line & indeed every project is multilingual

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Objective 4.2 - a closer look

who participates in our projects?

• research teams

• suppliers of LT products (SMEs)

• providers of language services (SMEs)

– mostly translation & localisation

• user organisations

– private & public, big & small

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And beyond the projects…

• META-NET: an alliance of researchers, provider & user industries, language communities, policy makers (www.meta-net.eu)

• Strategic Research Agenda

• Creating and sharing of language resources, including for lesser-resourced languages (www.meta-share.eu)

• Business Forum for Language Technology Stakeholders

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To sum up…

MULTILINGUALISM IN EUROPE 2020

THE HUMAN BEING TO BE EFFECTIVELY ASSISTED BY TECHNOLOGY!

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Thank you!

infso-e1@ec.europa.eu

Upcoming events:http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/

language-technologies/upcoming_en.html