Date: Wednesday, 4 November 2020
Time: 12:00 - 13:00
Venue: Register for this event through this and receive a Zoom link to the event
Speaker: , Department of Artificial Intelligence
What does the European Language Grid offer?
Europe has 24 official languages. Handling them in a way that satisfies the cultural, organisational and commercial demands is the stuff of both dreams and nightmares. The dream is the preservation of multilingual diversity without pain - and Language Technology (LT), clearly has a major role to play in its realisation. However, nightmares lurk. One of them is fragmentation.
In Europe, LT is fragmented – by nation states, languages and sectors - and has not yet been able to reach its full potential. The European Language Grid (ELG) is intended to overcome this problem by serving as a primary platform running tools, services, data sets and resources. It will enable the European LT community, commercial and non-commercial, to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets into the platform, to deploy them through the grid, and to connect with other resources.
The project is coordinated by a core consortium alongside partners involved in relevant initiatives: thirty two National Competence Centres (including the University of Malta) have been named, and a European Language Technology Council is in the process of being formed for European coordination.
Through a programme of open calls, pilot projects will be financially supported to demonstrate the usefulness of the ELG as a platform and also as a European project and initiative.
The talk will elaborate on the above themes. It should appeal to users and developers of language technologies as well as those interested in how technology can lower barriers and increase cooperation.
