European Language Equality Goals and Features

Overview

With a large and all-encompassing consortium consisting of 52 partners covering all European countries, research and industry and all major pan-European initiatives, the European Language Equality (ELE) project developed a strategic research, innovation and implementation agenda as well as a roadmap for achieving full digital language equality in Europe by 2030. The primary goal of the follow-up project ELE 2 is to revise, extend and further promote the strategic agenda and roadmap.

Despite the META-NET White Paper series reporting on this issue almost ten years ago, technology support for Europe’s languages is still characterised by a stark imbalance. While many resources and technologies exist for English, the majority of other languages suffer from a lack of technology support. The results of the ELE project based on various examination methodologies also indicate the existing imbalance between the European languages. In ELE, we have developed a strategic plan and roadmap to address this situation in a comprehensive way by establishing full digital language equality in 2030 and will revise and extend the strategic plan in the current project ELE 2.

Results of ELE

The main tangible results produced by the ELE project are as follows:

• The research partners prepared updates of the 32 META-NET White Papers including the results of an enormous and exhaustive data collection procedure that provides a detailed, empirical and dynamic map of technology support for our languages.
• A number of networks and initiatives (CLAIRE, CLARIN, LT Innovate, META-NET, ELG, ECSPM, EFNIL, ELEN, LIBER, NEM and Wikipedia) produced one report each in which they collected, consolidated and presented their own positions, needs, wishes, demands and visions with regard to Language Technology and the idea of establishing digital language equality in Europe.
• The industry partners produced four technical deep dives for the main areas of Language Technology: Machine Translation, Speech Technologies, Text Analytics and Natural Language Understanding as well as Data.
• These, and a number of additional reports, were used as input for the strategic agenda and roadmap, which will be consolidated in the second half of 2022.
• The ELE project took into account more than 80 languages.
• The SRIA can be found here.

Results of ELE 2

The main tangible results to be produced by the ELE 2 project are as follows:

• Additional feedback from relevant stakeholder groups will be gathered to extend and revise the strategic research and innovation agenda.
• The research partners will liaise with national and international funding agencies as well as policy makers to prepare the ground for a joint ELE programme
• The consortium will launch an open call for SRIA contribution projects, which will be financially supported by the ELE 2 project through the Financial Support to Third Parties mechanism; we expect a total number of 8-12 such projects to produce, among others, clearly defined and potentially also implemented use cases and best-practice examples of language resource development and language technology implementations in relevant industry sectors and other areas of life.
• A prioritised list of missing language resources and tools that are needed to level up the technological support for each language covered will be prepared.
• The communication and dissemination activities established in ELE will be continued.
• The ELE dashboard will be further maintained.
• The ELE 2 project will take into account more than 80 languages.