Dear reader,

As we are headed towards Brussels for META-FORUM 2022, this 15th ELT Newsletter brings you the latest news and updates about tomorrow’s conference (for which you can still register for online participation), with an overview of the programme for each day in the respective newsletter section – Day 1 (8 June) focussing on the European Language Grid, while Day 2 (9 June) is dedicated to European Language Equality. We hope to see you in person or virtually on the screen, but we also have further news for you.

In terms of ELG, we can happily announce that Release 3 of the cloud platform is now live. The new design and additional functionalities will be presented tomorrow morning at META-FORUM, but also at the next ELG National Workshop, which is only a week and a half away and addresses researchers and experts that work with English Language Technology, in and outside the UK. You can learn more about both in the ELG section below.

The ELE section of the newsletter is even more packed with information, including a new network for young AI researchers in Europe, the release of a WordPress plugin for automated website translation and a reminder of our TDLE 2022 workshop at LREC 2022 later in June. Finally, check out the profile on Fondazione Bruno Kessler, partner in the ELE project consortium, and learn about the activities of this research institute in the Autonomous Province of Trento.

With best regards

Georg Rehm

• “The quest for explainable AI” – VentureBeat, 6 May 2022
• “Boosting language technology – Michael Rosner” – Times of Malta, 7 May 2022
• “Amazon Unveils Long-Term Goal in Natural Language Processing” – Slator, 9 May 2022
• “The Ecosystem: Can start-ups thrive in the European Health Data Space?” – Science|Business, 10 May 2022
• “Machine Learning’s Sweet Spot: Pure Approaches in NLP and Document Analysis” – KDnuggets, 10 May 2022
• “Google gets more multilingual, but will it get the nuance?” – ABC News, 11 May 2022
• “How NLP can help with at-risk patients, SDOH and pop health” – Healthcare IT News, 12 May 2022
• “Lang.ai looks to help orgs extract value from customer conversations, with AI” – VentureBeat, 12 May 2022
• “Google Has a Plan to Stop Its New AI From Being Dirty and Rude” – Wired, 12 May 2022
• “AI21 Labs claims it’s building the next phase of natural language processing” – VentureBeat, 12 May 2022
• “The book character gender gap: AI finds more men in fiction than women” – World Economic Forum, 13 May 2022
• “Ethical AI becomes a boardroom issue… but implementation is another matter” – Investment Monitor, 13 May 2022
• “This Germany-based AI Startup is Developing the Next Enterprise Search Engine Fueled by NLP and Open-Source” – Marktechpost, 14 May 2022 
• “Google Translate Utilizes Zero-Resource Machine Translation To Support New Languages” – Marktechpost, 14 May 2022 
• “Is NLP innovating faster than other domains of AI” – Analytics India Magazine, 16 May 2022
• “A European Perspective”: using ground-breaking technology to foster greater understanding between citizens in Europe” – European Broadcasting Union, 17 May 2022 
• “On visit to Seattle, Iceland’s president has a message for Amazon and Microsoft”– GeekWire, 19 May 2022
• “Understanding the difference between Conversational AI & chatbots” – PCQuest, 18 May 2022
• “DeepMind’s Gato is the Swiss Army Knife of AI models” – Analytics India Magazine, 18 May 2022 
• “Pair programming driven by programming language generation” – VentureBeat, 19 May 2022
• “In Tech-Assisted Interpreting, the Tricky Problem of Non-English ‘Person Names’” – Slator, 19 May 2022
• “The EU AI Act could help get to Trustworthy AI, according to the Mozilla Foundation’” – ZDNet, 20 May 2022
• “ETH Zürich Team Introduces A Novel Method To Decode Text From Accelerometer Signals Sensed At The User’s Wrist Using A Wearable Device” – Marktechpost, 22 May 2022 
• “AI could help us spot viruses like monkeypox before they cross over – and help conserve nature” – The Conversation, 27 May 2022 
• “The EU AI law will not be future-proof unless it regulates general purpose AI systems” – Slator, 30 May 2022 
• “France bans English gaming tech jargon in push to preserve language purity” – The Guardian, 31 May 2022
• “How NLP is overcoming the document bottleneck in digital threads” – VentureBeat, 31 May 2022
• “Large Language Models May Leak Personal Data, Studies Show” – Slator, 31 May 2022 
• “The role of AI in data privacy” – VentureBeat, 1 June 2022
• “Image-Generating AI Keeps Doing Weird Stuff We Don't Understand” – Vice, 1 June 2022
• “Who’s liable for AI-generated lies?” – TechCrunch 1 June 2022
• “The Race to Hide Your Voice” – Wired, 1 June 2022
• “Hey, Siri: What about Te Reo speakers?” – Newsroom, 1 June 2022

• Pyramid charts are popular visualisations both for science and meme content, but when they depict the amount of digital resources for different groups of languages, they’re a wakening call.
• Remakes and sequels are a big hit in the film industry – but how do you bring back a star that has lost his voice to cancer? AI and voice tech to the help.
• The tweet says it all: Philosophy thought experiments illustrated with DALL-E.
• Robots that incinerate things might sound like an idea for sci-fi horror, but in the highly important area of agriculture, burning weeds with the help of AI could be a big help.

When META-FORUM 2022 opens its doors and starts the live stream tomorrow morning, you can expect a full day dedicated to Language Technology in Europe and the European Language Grid: Starting with an invited keynote on AI sovereignty by Jonas Andrulis of Aleph Alpha, the first half of Day 1 focuses on the functionalities, show cases, best practices and pilot projects of ELG. In the afternoon, we invite you to enjoy several panels and discussions with representatives from the main initiatives in the European Language-centric AI community, the European LT industry as well as the European Commission. For the full programme of both days and the option of a last-minute registration for online participation, head over to our ELG website.

In the second session of the day, members of the ELG technical team from Sheffield, Athens and Berlin will present and demonstrate the final release of the European Language Grid platform, which has been live since last week. The session includes a tutorial for all functionalities and new features of ELG Release 3. You can already have a look at the newly designed platform, including the informative front page and our new section for use cases.

If you cannot find the time to follow along tomorrow, we have good news: The next national workshop on the European Language Grid takes place on Friday, 17 June, and is dedicated to using ELG for language technologies and language resources in English. Our colleagues at the University of Sheffield invite LT researchers and experts in the UK and beyond to a demonstration, training session and stakeholder discussion about the primary platform for language technology in Europe. Further details and registration can be found on our website.

While the first day of META-FORUM 2022 is dedicated to ELG, Day 2 falls under the motto of Digital Language Equality. Two keynotes by June Lowery-Kingston of the European Commission and Francois Alfonsi, Member of the European Parliament, kick off the second round of sessions. Topics include the representation of language in national LT and AI strategies in Europe, the Digital Language Equality Dashboard, cross-language comparisons of the state of LT support for Europe’s languages, deep dives into machine translation, speech technologies and text analysis as well as our vision of Digital Language Equality by 2030. The conference closes with an outlook on the future of European Language Equality, which – this much we can reveal – looks promising. If you are not convinced yet, read the full programme of META-FORUM 2022 and use your final chance to register free of charge for virtual participation. 

Our colleagues at CLAIRE have launched a new initiative in March, the Rising Researchers Network (R2Net). Aimed at Master students, PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers in the area of Artificial Intelligence, the network already consists of over 100 members sharing internships, job opportunities and tips for an easier PhD life, organising lightning talks and securing partnerships and financial benefits for members attending summer schools. To learn more and become a member of R2Net, have a look at the CLAIRE website.

In two weeks, LREC 2022 continues the summer of conferences with its five-day event on language resources and evaluation in Marseille, France. On 20 June, in the afternoon of the first conference day, the ELE consortium will host its workshop Towards Digital Language Equality (TDLE 2022), featuring a number of DLE-related research papers and a keynote on “Measuring Cultural Representativeness and Rethinking LT4All” by Antonios Anastasopoulos from George Mason University. To participate in the workshop, you can register for LREC 2022 on their website. 

The European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) does what its name promises: It collects language data and resources for European languages and makes them available to the public. One of its applications is eTranslation, an open tool for automated website translation. Now, ELRC published a WordPress plugin for eTranslation, which was presented at an introduction event this morning. For more information on eTranslation, ELRC and the new plugin, visit their website.

• June 8-9: META-FORUM 2022 (hybrid event, Brussels & online)
• June 17: 19th National ELG Workshop: United Kingdom (online)
• June 20-25: LREC 2022 (hybrid event, Marseille & online)

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) is situated in Trentino, a North-East Italy Province governed under a special autonomy statute. With more than 400 researchers, FBK conducts research in the areas of Information Technology, Materials and Microsystems, Italo-Germanic studies, and Religious studies. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) research group, part of the Digital Health & Wellbeing Centre, is currently involved in the ELE project. The activities of the Digital Health & Wellbeing Centre focus on excellent scientific research in the field of Computer Science and AI techniques and methodologies for health and care, as well as social and technological innovation for an important impact both on the local community, at national and international level.

The NLP research group is active in the following areas: text mining (document classification, information extraction from text, semantic inferences, analysis of the sentiment and of the emotional content of texts); conversational agents (task oriented dialogue systems, collaborative human-machine dialogues, generation of explanations); and development of linguistic resources. In recent years, the NLP research group has been involved in several European projects, such as ANTIDOTE, which fosters an integrated vision of explainable AI, where low-level characteristics of the deep learning process are combined with higher-level schemas proper of the human argumentation capacity; and E3C, which has created and made publicly available a corpus of clinical cases in 5 European languages (Italian, English, Spanish, French, and Basque). Starting in September 2022, FBK will be a work package leader in Horizon Europe eCREAM project, which focuses on quality-of-care assessment in emergency medicine, and will work in the Horizon Europe IDEA4RC project, which aims to improve the governance, the sharing and the re-use of health data for rare cancers.

FBK in the ELE project

The next ELT newsletter will be sent out on 21 June 2022. Until then, follow our ELT social media accounts (as linked below) for the latest news!