• “The therapists using AI to make therapy better” – MIT Technology Review, 6 December 2021
• “Natural Language Processing is Shaping Intelligent Automation” – VentureBeat, 8 December 2021
• “4 Reasons Transformer Models are Optimal for NLP” – eWeek, 8 December 2021
• “Hungarian gov teams up with Eastern European bank to develop AI supercomputer” – VentureBeat, 9 December 2021
• “Latvia can become leading developer of multilingual technologies in Europe - Tilde head” – The Baltic Times, 12 December 2021
• “NLP Models Struggle to Understand Recursive Noun Phrases” – Unite.AI, 16 December 2021
• “Slovenia Leads Europe in AI Researchers Per Capita” – Total Slovenia News, 16 December 2021
• “Languages could go extinct at a rate of one per month this century” – New Scientist, 16 December 2021
• “Most Popular NLP Papers Of 2021” – Analytics India Magazine, 17 December 2021
• “Lessons from LanguageWire’s Machine Translation Journey” – Slator, 17 December 2021
• “Open source NLP is fueling a new wave of startups” – Venture Beat, 23 December 2021

• The initiative for “Better Images of AI” has published its first gallery in order to provide alternatives to “a glowing brain and shining robot” – to much acclaim.

• Look who made it into the highlights of the European AI Confederation “CLAIRE” and received a decorative card.

• Anybody working on a European level might have experienced a similar situation with the family between the years – we will continue to talk about Europe!

• AI4Diversity presents an interesting Augmented Reality tool that can prevent both fun and frustration – a Rubrik’s cube solver. 

This news is from last year, but not as old as that may sound: In the middle of December, a new ELG tutorial video was released. The 14-minute introduction explains the basic functionalities for browsing, using and providing resources to the European Language Grid. Lean back, relax and learn how ELG works as an easy-to-access cloud platform for Language Technology tools and corpora for all European languages. 

The European Language Grid aims to overcome the language barriers existing in Europe. One of the ELG pilot projects providing access to multilingual language resources was created by the Berlin-based company Coreon. We spoke with Michael Wetzel, Managing Director at Coreon, about how their project works and what impact it could have. Find out how both Coreon and ELG can help overcome the fragmentation of the European LT community – in our latest blog post.

phase-6 GmbH – phase6 is an Edutech company, focused on vocabulary training, a vital aspect of successful language learning. The company is focused on pupils within the German school system. Students can study vocabulary independently and aligned with the content of their school lessons. The value proposition of the phase6 vocabulary trainer is the cooperation with schoolbook publishers, allowing the users to easily import the relevant vocabulary from their school books without additional copying or typing.

As of Saturday and with the beginning of the new year, France holds the Presidency of the EU Council. A challenging time overall, but some of the focus topics selected for the half-year presidency lead into promising directions. Namely, the promotion of digitalisation, the combating of inequalities and the renewal of the EU’s “humanist vocation” inspire the hope that Digital Language Equality by 2030 remains a realistic vision for Europe.

It has been mentioned many times, but maybe you are unsure about what Digital Language Equality is supposed to mean exactly. While waiting for the full specification, revisit our definition of DLE based on our project research so far – in this timeless blog article from June 2021.

Charles University

The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL) is a research and teaching department in the School of Computer Science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University (Univerzita Karlova, CUNI) in Prague. It was founded in 1990, continuing work formerly conducted by the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics since the early 1960s, first at the Faculty of Philosophy and later at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, which houses the institute to this day.

Its research encompasses many topics in the areas of Computational Linguistics, Language Technologies and Natural Language Processing, with a multitude of national and international projects, combining knowledge from linguistics, mathematics, general computer science, statistical modelling, machine and deep learning and software engineering.

As a teaching department, it offers Czech and English programs for both a doctorate (Ph.D.) and a Master's degree (Mgr. or MSc.) in Computational Linguistics and Machine Learning. It participates in the double-degree Erasmus Mundus European Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies (LCT) and also carries Bachelor level courses for the Artificial Intelligence specialization of the Informatics (Computer Science) program.

From 2000-2011, the Institute served as the coordinator of the Center for Computational Linguistics. Since 2010, the Institute has been the main host of the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ Research Infrastructure as part of the CLARIN and DARIAH EU networks.

Prof. Dr. Jan Hajič, Project Leader of European Language Equality at CUNI: “Our involvement in the ELE project is to coordinate the collection of evidence from various stakeholders, from research to industry, to support the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda in Language Technology for the next decade. We believe that it will enable the continuation of excellent research in the area of Language Technology in Europe, and thanks to that, in turn, the ubiquitous use of Language Technology in everyday life for everyone.”

The next ELT newsletter will be sent out on 18 January 2022. Until then, follow our ELT social media accounts (as linked below) for the latest news!