Dear reader,

Welcome to the first edition of the European Language Technology (ELT) newsletter. It's been a while since you've hit the "subscribe to newsletter" button on the ELE or ELG website or since you've heard from us through other channels. You may have seen that we've recently launched our ELT social media accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn. Today, we're happy to circulate the first edition of our new monthly newsletter.

Under the European Language Technology umbrella, we combine all news from and about the two European research projects European Language Equality (ELE) and European Language Grid (ELG), while also including related news from the European Language Technology and NLP community. In later editions of the newsletter, we will also post relevant news from related projects and initiatives. Please let us know if you have any interesting news to share from your research groups, companies or projects.

While this introductory section covers general topics, you can find news and information about ELE and ELG in the subsections below. We hope you find this newsletter, which will pop up in your mailbox on the first Tuesday of the month, to be informative and somewhat entertaining! We would be happy if you forwarded this mail to your colleagues and friends or shared this subscription link. For now, enjoy our first newsletter and please feel free to contact us with feedback via the addresses included below.

With best regards

Georg Rehm

• “How AI translation could unseat English as the lingua franca of the business world” – Fast Company, 21 July 2021
• "The Chatbot Problem" – The New Yorker, 23 July 2021
• “Europe needs a change in mindset on technology and geopolitics” – European Council on Foreign Affairs, 03 August 2021
• “Sustainable development through mother tongue and multilingualism” – Helsinki Times, 11 August 2021
• “Can NLP Soon Include Signed Languages?” – Unite.AI, 13 August 2021
• “Critical Reasons Why You Should Not Ignore Multilingual Marketing Anymore” – The Web Writer Spotlight, 19 August 2021
• “Natural Language Processing Uncovers Silver Linings In the Covid-19 Pandemic” – Forbes, 22 August 2021
• “AI can write in English. Now it’s learning other languages” – Wired, 23 August 2021
• “How Hugging Face is tackling bias in NLP” – VentureBeat, 25 August 2021
• “Fired Google AI ethics lead joins natural language processing start-up” – Silicone Republic, 27 August 2021
• “Passing the chimp test: how women were key to the birth of language” – The Guardian, 28 August 2021
• “NVIDIA's latest tech makes AI voices more expressive and realistic” – Engadget, 31 August 2021
• “Wikipedia Is Trying to Transcend the Limits of Human Language” – Slate, 01 September 2021

Welcome to the subsection on the European Language Grid, the primary platform for Language Technology in Europe! The ELG currently holds almost 3,500 language resources (including corpora and data sets) and more than 350 technologies that can be used through our ELG APIs. The ELG serves as a sharing and exchange platform for the whole European LT community, more than 1,700 members of which are already listed in the ELG directory. On our path to creating a digital marketplace for European LT-developing companies to showcase and offer their technologies as well as becoming an inclusive LT platform for industry and research, we are constantly expanding and inviting  new members to join the ELG and benefit from the network.

In this section, we will inform you about selected recent updates and upgrades to the ELG platform: new tools, new members, new features and developments. For the upcoming edition, you can expect some major news regarding the ELG Python SDK – stay tuned!

• Coreon SPARQL Query Tool – a query tool to selected Coreon repositories and endpoints which can be accessed using the SPARQL query language; results are returned as RDF triples. The tool was added by Coreon GmbH on 27 August 2021. See the "Related LRTs" tab for the list of supported repositories. This tool was developed under the umbrella of an ELG-supported pilot project.
• Bangor University’s Welsh Language Transcription Tool (“Trawsgrifiwr”) – a speech to text transcription service for the Welsh language which uses speech recognition to make creating subtitles for Welsh audio files and videos easier, added by the Language Technologies Unit of Bangor University on 24 August 2021
• E3C Clinical Entity Recognizer – Basque – a tool that uses deep learning models (XLM-RoBERTa multilingual base model) to extract clinical entities (disorders) from Basque clinical cases and tag them with UMLS codes, added by Fondazione Bruno Kessler on 10 August 2021. RoBERTa was fine-tuned on E3C, which is a corpus of clinical documents in five European languages: English, Basque, French, Italian and Spanish. The tool was developed under the umbrella of an ELG-supported pilot project.

• City Falcon Ltd: Using machine learning, automation, and NLP, CityFALCON transforms unstructured financial content from 12k sources into structured data, generates analytics (sentiment, summaries), extracts insights, and delivers data via web and API.
• EDIA is on a mission to impact educational publishing by making every single word within each and every piece of educational content modular, goal-oriented and reusable using high-end AI.
• Lekta AI is a conversational AI platform used by Europe’s major banking, insurance and telecom enterprises. Combining industry experience, academic research and self-developed technology solutions. Lekta helps customers visualize, plan and execute AI and other technology-driven change that results in decreased customer care cost burdens, high customer satisfaction and growth in sales opportunities.

Welcome to the subsection of the European Language Equality project, which develops a strategic research, innovation and implementation agenda as well as a roadmap for achieving full digital language equality by 2030. The ELE project consists of a large, all-encompassing consortium of 52 partners covering almost all European countries, research and industry and all of the major pan-European initiatives.

In this section, you can learn about the latest developments in the project that will provide concrete recommendations in terms of future research and investment with the ultimate goal of putting the European Parliament resolution on “Language equality in the digital age” into action. In July, the ELE project successfully passed its six months review meeting with the European Commission, concluding with the insight that Language Technology as well as language-centric AI are becoming increasingly important in Europe – making the issue of Digital Language Equality even more relevant.

September 7–11: EURALEX XIX 2021 (online)

September 20–22: Languages & the Media GALA 2021, Globalization and Localization Association (online)

September 23: 9th National ELG Workshop - Spain (online)

September 27–29: CLARIN Annual Conference 2021 (online)

November 15–17: META-FORUM 2021 (online)

ADAPT

ADAPT is a world-leading Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centre for AI Driven Digital Content Technology operating across Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Dublin City University (DCU), University College Dublin (UCD), Technological University Dublin (TUD), Maynooth University (MU), Munster Technological University (MTU), Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT), and the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). ADAPT brings leading academics, researchers and industry partners together to deliver excellent science, engage the public, develop novel solutions for business across all sectors and enhance Ireland’s international reputation. The centre utilises an interdisciplinary ethos to advance and propel learning and research, incorporating leading experts from the complementary fields of, Social Sciences, Communications, Commerce/Fintech, Ethics, Law, Health, Environment, and Sustainability.

Prof. Andy Way, Deputy Director of ADAPT, based in DCU, leads the ELE project as coordinator. Speaking about the ELE project at the start of the project, Prof. Way said: 

“ELE has the potential to influence the European Language Technology Landscape for the next 10 to 15 years by addressing the crucial topic of language equality, creating more public visibility for the LT community and strengthening the relationship of the ELG and the European AI Community. It will also help establish LT and language-centric AI in Horizon Europe and Digital Europe Programmes. It is perfectly aligned with the ADAPT MT strategy where language can no longer be a barrier to access to information in the 21st Century.”