Dear reader,

The second phase of ELE started only a month ago but we are already gearing up for our open call for SRIA contribution projects. These projects will advance implementations of language technologies in industry and beyond, bringing us closer to the project’s goal of digital language equality in Europe by 2030.

We also pass on information from the European Commission about another call, this time for tenders to support the deployment of automated website translation and automated speech recognition as well as to conduct market research into language technology use in general. 

Finally, take a look at some of the latest organisations and technologies to join ELG. We have new machine translation tools for Dutch, Hungarian, Portuguese and Swedish, nicely in keeping with new organisation Machine Translate’s mission of making MT more widely accessible.
 

With best regards

Georg Rehm

• “Inside a radical new project to democratize AI” – MIT Technology Review, 12 July 2022
• “CMU’s Novel ‘ReStructured Pre-training’ NLP Approach Scores 40 Points Above Student Average on a Standard English Exam” – Synced, 28 June 2022
• “How Woebot Uses an NLP Chatbot to Fight Depression and Anxiety” – MakeUseOf, 30 June 2022
• “The Fight Over Which Uses of AI Europe Should Outlaw” – Wired, 30 June 2022
• “An artificially intelligent first author presents many ethical questions—and could upend the publishing process” – Scientific American, 30 June 2022
• “It’s alive! How belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem” – NBC News, 30 June 2022
• “Reddit acquires natural language processing company MeaningCloud” – TechCrunch, 1 July 2022
• “Video Highlights: The Rise of DeBERTa for NLP Downstream Tasks” – insideBIGDATA, 4 July 2022
• “Google AI Introduces Minerva: A Natural Language Processing (NLP) Model That Solves Mathematical Questions” – Marktechpost, 4 July 2022
• “EU Passes New Regulations for Voice AI, and Digital Technology” – Voicebot.ai, 5 July 2022
• “How natural language processing can help relieve the healthcare worker shortage” – The World Economic Forum, 5 July 2022
• “AI2’s PRIOR Team Introduces Unified-IO: The First Neural Model To Execute Various AI Tasks Spanning Classical Computer Vision, Image Synthesis, Vision-and-Language, and Natural Language Processing NLP” – Marktechpost, 7 July 2022
• “Meta's AI-based Wikipedia successor 'may be the next big break in NLP'” – The Register, 11 July 2022
• “Cortical.io Semantic Folding Approach Demonstrates a 2,800x Acceleration and 4,300x Increase in Energy Efficiency over BERT” – insideBIGDATA, 12 July 2022
• “No Language Left Behind” – Towards AI, 14 July 2022
• “How To Use AI To Eliminate Bias” – Forbes, 17 July 2022
• “As AI language skills grow, so do scientists’ concerns” – The Associated Press, 17 July 2022
• “Londa Schiebinger: Inclusive Design Will Help Create AI That Works For Everyone” – Stanford HAI, 18 July 2022
• “Estonia wants tech devs to improve its AI-led public services” – Emerging Europe, 19 July 2022
• “Big Tech builds AI with bad data. So scientists sought better sets.” – The Washington Post, 21 July 2022

• An evergreen reminder that there is one question you should never ask a linguist. 

• Davyth Hicks from ELE partner ELEN has some good news at the ELEN 2022 Summer School in Valencia.

•  Join Martha The Overworked Engineer on a crash course in machine learning in comic form, courtesy of Google AI.

• The EU institutions may have a reputation for being rather dry, but these videos definitely show off their… creative side.  

ELG continues to progress towards its final status as a not-for-profit legal entity. Meanwhile, the European commission has asked us to pass on their call for tenders that may be of interest to the ELT community, regarding support for the deployment of language technology solutions in Europe.

Translation engines from Dutch to Portuguese, Hungarian to Polish, and Swedish to Portuguese, created as part of the NTEU project – NTEU aims to develop peer-to-peer Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems in all combinations of European languages and to make these available via the eTranslation Service, to assist in the development of a single digital market. This is a key priority for the European Commission, particularly for under-resourced EU languages.

Peer-to-peer machine learning is one field of research where NMT and different hybrid techniques have proven highly successful. The use of peer-to-peer language translation systems – avoiding the necessity of pivoting through a common language such as English, reduces the informational loss associated with pivot-language approaches, improving the disambiguation of the calculated neural network leading to higher quality generated translations.

Machine Translate – Machine Translate is an organisation building open resources and community for machine translation. Its content covers everything about machine translation, from products to research, and from history to news. Machine Translate’s mission is to make machine translation more accessible to more people as the field of machine translation grows.

ELE 2 may only have kicked off last month but already we are excited to announce the open call for SRIA Contribution Projects that we will be launching in the second half of September. 

The projects will contribute to the strategic agenda and roadmap by producing clearly defined and potentially also implemented use cases and best-practice examples of language resource development and language technology implementations, including feasibility studies, cost estimates, the validation of KPIs, and guidelines for concrete implementations to motivate and facilitate the buy-in and take-up from the funding agencies and implementing parties. The scope of the projects can cover relevant industry sectors or other areas of life. 

Projects will be assessed based on their contribution to the overall success and uptake of the strategic agenda, as well as innovativeness, impact, and budget. Successful projects will receive up to 25,000€ and will run from roughly December 2022 - March 2023 (2-3 months in total).

Applications are open to research organisations, NGOs, incorporated associations and companies. For more information visit the ELE website or get in touch with us directly.

Finally, ELE partner LIBER has published a roundup of the first phase of the ELE project, with a particular focus on research libraries’ relationship to language technology and digital language equality. Read it here.

The next ELT newsletter will be sent out on 6 September 2022. Until then, follow our ELT social media accounts (as linked below) for the latest news!