Dear reader,

After two years of being bound to our screens, META-FORUM 2022 finally returns to the analogue model – while keeping the advantages of the digital: live streaming and chat rooms. The programme for our hybrid conference on European Language Technology has just been updated and we look forward to two days full of presentations, discussions and demos about ELG, ELE and so much more. If you haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for? We’d be happy to have you.

Further ELG news concerns the past and the present: While a number of important project deliverables have been submitted to the European Commission in April, two national workshops in Malta and Slovenia are coming up this month. Details can be found in the ELG section of the newsletter, while the ELE section informs you about our interactive dashboard for the Digital Language Equality Metric as well as the six papers accepted for the workshop Towards Digital Language Equality (TDLE 2022) at LREC 2022.

Finally, we want to thank all of you who participated in our survey on the digital support for European languages: After its closure on 30 April, we counted 21,455 responses from all European countries! The results are now analysed and will be presented at META-FORUM 2022, so make sure to attend. Until then, enjoy another ELE partner profile, this time about the Dutch Language Institute (INT) and its role as a “developer, keeper and distributor of corpora, lexica, dictionaries and grammars”.

With best regards

Georg Rehm

• “A new vision of artificial intelligence for the people” – MIT Technology Review, 22 April 2022
• “How NLP & NLU Work For Semantic Search” – Search Engine Journal, 25 April 2022
• “Will Elon Musk put Twitter on a collision course with global speech regulators?” – TechCrunch, 26 April 2022
• “Natural Language Processing Can Improve Bipolar Disorder Care” – HealthITAnalytics, 26 April 2022
• “Google Trains 540 Billion Parameter AI Language Model PaLM” – InfoQ, 26 April 2022
• “How Automation Affects the Translation Profession” – Slator, 27 April 2022
• “Open-source NLP company Deepset nabs $14M to power ‘plain-English’ enterprise search” – VentureBeat, 28 April 2022
• “Barcelona Supercomputing Center project begins crowdsourcing to train AI on cultural heritage” – Science|Business, 28 April 2022
• “Meta AI announces long-term study on human brain and language processing” – VentureBeat, 28 April 2022
• “European project for ‘brain-like’ AI” – eeNews Europe, 2 May 2022
• “Albania Announces National Voice Assistant” – Voicebot, 2 May 2022
• “Europe’s New Law Will Force Secretive TikTok to Open Up” – Wired, 4 May 2022
• “Swedish platform scores €1.15 million to take NLP mainstream” – Tech.eu, 4 May 2022
• “A.I. Talks with Animals” – Towards Data Science, 4 May 2022
• “Understanding the Role of AI, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing in RegTech Development” – AiThority, 5 May 2022
• “Parliament gives EU a push to move faster on artificial intelligence” – Science|Business, 5 May 2022
• “Pangeanic Develops a Free Machine Translation Engine to Help Ukrainian Citizens” – Slator, 6 May 2022

• Since the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine, many European companies have started offering free services for the support of Ukrainians arriving in the EU. ELG partner Pangeanic followed suit and decided to help make language barriers disappear.
• Interactive educational books for children show that it’s never too early to start learning about things like colours, animals, numbers or even computer engineering.
• A LinkedIn post with a screenshot of a Tweet discussing the usage of Reddit – crossposting at its finest, but the advice given is worth being shared on every platform.
• Daniel Kahnemann’s central work on the human ways of thinking has been inspiring people in and outside of AI research for years – including Microsoft’s Fabio Maioli, who only has the highest praise to offer for Thinking Fast and Slow.

Three years have passed since the last META-FORUM in presence, but for the (formal) end of the ELG and ELE projects, the international conference series on powerful and innovative language technologies can finally return to Brussels: We invite you to join us on 8 and 9 June for the 11th META-FORUM 2022 with a fitting motto: “Joining the European Language Grid – Together Towards Digital Language Equality”. The programme has just been updated and includes highlights such as a demo of the final ELG release, the findings on the state of Digital Language Equality in Europe, a panel on language-centric AI and an LT industry session. Learn more and register for free at www.meta-forum.eu. 

By the end of April, the ELG consortium handed several deliverables to the European Commission, increasing the total count to 32. The reports, such as the evaluation of the pilot project execution, have also been published through the ELG website, where close to 3.5 years of work on the European Language Grid platform are documented, clocking in at 1,887 pages. If you’re ever in need of reading material … 

If you like data and data visualisation, you will enjoy this: Our Digital Language Equality Metric is now live in the shape of an interactive dashboard! The dashboard presents an overview of the technological and contextual support that European languages currently receive, as represented in the European Language Grid (with additional help from the ELE consortium). You can compare languages with one another, choose different types of factors and inspect the numbers of speakers of the languages on an interactive map. We hope that the dashboard is insightful and easy to use for everyone who cares about equality amongst European languages.

Digital Language Equality in Europe by 2030 and Deep Natural Language Understanding are the socio-political and scientific goals, respectively, envisioned by the ELE project. But what needs to be done to achieve this – which scientific breakthroughs are necessary, which developments need to be supported? In the Report on the state of Language Technology in 2030, the ELE consortium lays out the most important research topics to achieve our goals and presents the findings from more than 450 survey responses and 65 expert interviews with the European LT community. The report is part of a long list of deliverables that the project team produced in the past year, which will not get any shorter in the last few months of the project – keep an eye on the list and our social media channels for further reports.

• May 20: National ELG Workshop Malta (online)
• May 22-27: ACL 2022 (hybrid event, Dublin & online)
• May 27: National ELG Workshop Slovenia (hybrid event, Ljubljana & online)
• June 8-9: META-FORUM 2022 (hybrid event, Brussels & online)
• June 20-25: LREC 2022 (hybrid event, Marseille & online)

Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal

The Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (INT) (or Dutch Language Institute) is the place for anyone who wants to know anything about the Dutch language through the centuries. It is a scholarly but at the same time easily accessible institute that studies all aspects of the Dutch language, including its vocabulary, grammar and linguistic variations. The institute collects new Dutch words, updates important reference works such as the Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst, the main standard work on Dutch grammar, and creates terminology lists to make professional specialised vocabularies accessible.

The institute also plays a central role in the Dutch-speaking world (Netherlands, Flanders, Suriname and the Dutch-speaking Caribbean islands) as a developer, keeper and distributor of corpora, lexica, dictionaries and grammars. With these sustainable language resources, all results of scholarly methods, the Dutch Language Institute provides the necessary building blocks for the study of Dutch. These are available at taalmaterialen.ivdnt.org.

The INT builds the digital language infrastructure for Dutch, and as a CLARIN B Centre, the INT is part of CLARIN. This European program offers a stable, sustainable, accessible and expandable common infrastructure for research in the humanities. It provides researchers and students with the digital materials and tools relevant to their research. The institute is a CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Dutch (kdutch.ivdnt.org), collecting and providing information on the Dutch language, as well as links to tools and resources; it is also coordinating CLARIN-Belgium.

The next ELT newsletter will be sent out on 7 June 2022. Until then, follow our ELT social media accounts (as linked below) for the latest news!