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Newsletter #19 – September 2022
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Dear reader,
ELE may be working to support Europe’s rich multilingual landscape throughout the year, but September 26, the European Day of Languages, sees the whole of Europe join in in celebrating linguistic diversity and language learning. Events are happening all over the continent, with a full overview in the ELE section of the newsletter, where you will also find information about our upcoming workshop with the European Parliament. We also present ELE partner EFNIL – the European Federation of National Institutions for Language.
The ELG platform continues to grow, with new tools and resources being added all the time, including this month’s featured tool, Prep for Adventure – a game bringing some intrepid spirit to English prepositions. The ELG YouTube channel has also been adding new clips, so subscribe there to be the first to see our latest video content.
Finally, a reminder that the open call for projects contributing to the Strategic Research, Innovation and Implementation Agenda developed in ELE will launch later this month, so keep an eye on our website and/or social media for upcoming information on participating.
With best regards
Georg Rehm
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Language Technology and NLP in the news
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- “Inside a radical new project to democratize AI” – MIT Technology Review, 12 July 2022
- “Nvidia Megatron: Not a robot in disguise, but a large language model that’s getting faster” – VentureBeat, 1 August 2022
- “GPT-3 AI Successfully Mimics Philosopher Daniel Dennett” – Voicebot.ai, 2 August 2022
- “On the Ethics of Writing With AIs” – Communications of the ACM, 3 August 2022
- “Meta is putting its latest AI chatbot on the web for the public to talk to” – The Verge, 5 August 2022
- “New Danish Political Party Runs AI Leader for Parliament” – Voicebot.ai, 5 August 2022
- “AI for Ukraine is a new educational project from AI HOUSE to support the Ukrainian tech community” – KDnuggets, 11 August 2022
- “To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up” – Wired, 14 August 2022
- “They’re Among Us: Malicious Bots Hide Using NLP and AI” – The New Stack, 15 August 2022
- “Let’s BLOOM with BigScience’s New AI Model” – Towards Data Science, 16 August 2022
- “Natural Language Processing Fosters New Protein Designs” – Dataconomy, 16 August 2022
- “Can conversational AI skip NLP training? Yellow AI has a plan” – VentureBeat, 18 August 2022
- “Amazon's AlexaTM 20B Model Outperforms GPT-3 on NLP Benchmarks” – InfoQ, 19 August 2022
- “Making use of AI now a ‘central challenge’ for Welsh and other minority languages, researchers say” – Nation.Cymru, 22 August 2022
- “Why AI leaders need a ‘backbone’ of large language models” – VentureBeat, 23 August 2022
- “How Google uses NLP to better understand search queries, content” – Search Engine Land, 23 August 2022
- “OpenAI is reducing the price of the GPT-3 API — here’s why it matters” – VentureBeat, 25 August 2022
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You may already follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn, but have you subscribed to the ELG YouTube channel? Here you can find videos from all sides of the ELG project, from results of the pilot projects to recordings of talks from this and previous years’ META-FORUM, as well as a how-to guide to using the ELG platform. And if you’ve been following our social media, you will already have seen the first of our latest series of videos – quick clips going into some of the key concepts behind ELG.
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Selected new tools and resources on the
European Language Grid
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Prep for Adventure: A game for the acquisition of English prepositions - Prep for adventure is a game designed to teach the six most frequent English prepositions (to, of, in, for, on, and with) at the A1 to A2 levels of proficiency. It is a single-player game comprised of five separate tasks – jumping puzzle, cooking, town maze, lighting the goblets, and a banter with a classmate. Their mechanics are then combined in the final task (The Final Fight) to elicit the correct responses of the subject. The language used in the game is adjusted for the subjects’ level of proficiency, the game is fully voiced and offers a degree of customization. All tasks are based on the gap-filling type of exercise where subjects have to complete a sentence with a missing word, either by typing it in or via different kinds of multiple-choice formats. The game is designed to advance the subjects’ performance in prepositional structures by exposing players to as much input as possible. The length of one average playthrough is approximately 30-45 minutes. The game was created in the RPG Maker MV engine where RPG stands for role-playing game, which is a genre of a game in which the player adopts a role/roles of a fictional character/characters in a (partly or fully) invented setting. The game story: The Grammar School of Witchcraft has been taken over by the Evil Preposition Magician and the player is trying to win their school back alongside with a young witch named Morphologina (the player’s guide).
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September started with the final review of the ELE project, with results from the five work packages being presented to the independent reviewers for feedback. Meanwhile ELE 2 really gets going, with the launch of our open call for SRIA contribution projects coming in the middle of the month. Check out the page on the ELE website for some initial information and stay tuned for the full details once the call is launched.
The European Day of Languages, Europe’s annual celebration of language learning and European linguistic diversity and heritage, takes place on 26 September. Established in 2001, the European Year of Languages, the day celebrates the full range of languages spoken in Europe, including official, regional, minority and migrant languages – do you still remember that we published the main results of the META-NET White Papers on 26 September 2012? Events are happening across the continent, both online and in person, from quizzes to language crash courses. The main event, organised by the European Commission and happening in conjunction with the European Year of Youth 2022, will address topics such as the language needs of refugee children, multilingual classrooms, and multilingualism as part of lifelong learning. The event can be streamed online, with interpreting in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Czech. For a full overview of events, take a look at these lists from the European Commission and the European Centre for Modern Languages.
Further down the line, the European Parliament’s Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) will be hosting a workshop entitled “Towards full digital language equality in a multilingual European Union” on November 8. The event aims to explore the research and development environment of language technologies in the context of multilingualism in Europe. It will present the results from the ELE project, in particular the strategic agenda and roadmap towards achieving full digital language equality by 2030. Work from ELG will also be presented, along with a panel discussion on challenges and opportunities for digital language equality in the EU held by policymakers and experts from academia and the industry. The workshop will be held in a hybrid format and you can register here.
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If you have an event that you think the European language technology community should know about, get in touch with us to have it featured in this newsletter.
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The ELE Consortium – Partner Presentation
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All the member states of the European Union have institutions whose role includes monitoring the official language or languages of their country, advising on language use, or developing language policy. Since its foundation in 2003, EFNIL has provided a forum for these institutions to exchange information about their work and to gather and publish information about language use and language policy within the European Union.
In addition, EFNIL encourages the study of the official European languages and a coordinated approach towards mother-tongue and foreign-language learning, as a means of promoting linguistic and cultural diversity within the European Union, and organises an annual Master’s Thesis Award for theses in Europe within the area of language use, language policy and multilingualism.
Alongside ELE, EFNIL is working on projects including European Language Monitor (ELM) and Language Legislation Europe (LLE), which document language legislation and language planning in Europe, and, of particular relevance to the ELT community, EFNILEX, a (semi)automatic method for preparation of bi- and multilingual dictionaries
President of EFNIL, Dr. Sabine Kirchmeier states: “Many EFNIL institutions not only cater for the national language but also care for minority languages, regional languages, and sign languages in their country. National languages, regional languages, and minority languages are facing the same challenges and need to work together. In many cases, speakers of less frequently spoken languages do not have access to the digital services that are available to users of more widespread languages. This is a problem for their participation in the democratic debate and activities in their countries, and for their use of digital public services and efficient use of digital tools.
“EFNIL has been coordinating the contributions about the views and needs of users and consumers in ELE 1, and we are proud to continue in ELE 2 providing consultations and documentation of stakeholder commitment to ELE’s strategic research agenda that will pave the way for better language technology support for all languages in the future.”
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The next ELT newsletter will be sent out on 4 October 2022. Until then, follow our ELT social media accounts (as linked below) for the latest news!
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