Good news for “linguistic” top management

STRATEGIC RESEARCH AGENDA FOR MULTILINGUAL EUROPE 2020 edited by the META Technology Council From the Executive Summary 1. As many as 21 European languages are at risk of digital extinction. ey could become victims of the digital age as they are under-represented online and underresourced with respect to language techno–logies. 2. Today’s computers cannot understand texts and questions well enough to provide translations, summaries or reliable answers, but in less than ten years such services will be offered for many languages. 3. […] human language will enable a host of innovative IT products and services 4. […] half a billion citizens speak one of over 60 European and many non-European languages as their mother tongue. Europe has more than 2,500 small and medium sized enterprises in language, knowledge and interface technologies, and more than 5,000 enterprises providing language services that can be improved and extended by technology. In addition, it has a long-standing R&D tradition with over 800 centres performing scientific and technological research on all European and many non-European languages. 5. We are confident that upcoming EU funding programmes, specifically Horizon 2020 and Connecting Europe Facility, combined with national and regional funding, can provide the necessary resources for accomplishing our joint vision. 6. e European problem lies less in the generation of new ideas than in their successful commercialisation

ABOUT META-NET META-NET is a Network of Excellence partially funded by the European Commission [61]. e network currently consists of 60 members in 34 European countries. META-NET forges the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance (META), a growing community of currently more than 650 language technology companies, research centres and professionals. META-NET fosters the technological foundations for a multilingual European information society that: 1. makes communication and cooperation possible across languages; 2. grants all Europeans equal access to information and knowledge regardless of their language; 3. builds upon and advances functionalities of networked information technology. e network supports a Europe that unites as a single digital market and information space. It stimulates and promotes multilingual technologies for all European languages. ese technologies support automatic translation, content production, information processing and knowledge management for a wide variety of subject domains and applications. ey also enable intuitive language-based interfaces to technology ranging from household electronics, machinery and vehicles to computers and robots. Launched on 1 February 2010, META-NET is conducting various activities in its three lines of action METAVISION, META-SHARE and META-RESEARCH. In addition, META-NET cooperates with more than 40 European projects, many research organisations, companies, language communities and industry associations. META-VISION fosters a dynamic and influential stakeholder community that unites around a shared vision and strategic research agenda (SRA). e main focus of this activity is to build a coherent and cohesive LT community in Europe by bringing together representatives from highly fragmented and diverse groups of stakeholders. White Papers were produced for 30 languages, each one describing the status of one language with respect to its state in the digital era and existing technological support [12]. e technology vision described in this agenda was bootstrapped through three sectorial Vision Groups. META-SHARE creates an open, distributed facility for exchanging and sharing resources. e peer-to-peer network of repositories will contain language data, tools and services that are documented with metadata and organised in standardised categories. e resources can be accessed and uniformly searched. e available resources include free, open-source materials as well as restricted, commercially available, fee-based items. META-RESEARCH builds bridges to related technology fields. is activity seeks to leverage advances in other fields and to capitalise on innovative research that can benefit language technology. e action line focuses on conducting leading-edge research in machine translation, collecting data, preparing data sets and organising language resources for evaluation purposes; compiling inventories of tools and methods; and organising workshops and training events for members of the community. office@meta-net.eu – http://www.meta-net.eu

MEMBERS OF META-NET

Austria Zentrum für Translationswissenscha, Universität Wien: Gerhard Budin Belgium Centre for Processing Speech and Images, University of Leuven: Dirk van Compernolle Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Centre, University of Antwerp: Walter Daelemans Bulgaria Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences: Svetla Koeva Croatia Institute of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Zagreb: Marko Tadić Cyprus Language Centre, School of Humanities: Jack Burston Czech Republic Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University in Prague: Jan Hajič Denmark Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Bente Maegaard Estonia Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu: Tiit Roosmaa, Kadri Vider Finland Computational Cognitive Systems Research Group, Aalto University: Timo Honkela   Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki: Kimmo Koskenniemi, Krister Lindén France Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’Ingénieur and Institute for Multilingual and Multimedia Information: Joseph Mariani   Evaluations and Language Resources Distribution Agency: Khalid Choukri   Laboratory of Computer Science, University of Le Mans: Holger Schwenk   Laboratoire Informatique d’Avignon, University of Avignon: Georges Linares Germany Language Technology Lab, DFKI: Hans Uszkoreit, Georg Rehm   Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition, RWTH Aachen University: Hermann Ney   Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University: Manfred Pinkal   Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart: Jonas Kuhn, Hinrich Schütze   Interactive Systems Lab, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology: Alex Waibel Greece R.C. “Athena”, Institute for Language and Speech Processing: Stelios Piperidis Hungary Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences: Tamás Váradi   Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics: Géza Németh, Gábor Olaszy Iceland School of Humanities, University of Iceland: Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson Ireland School of Computing, Dublin City University: Josef van Genabith Italy Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”: Nicoletta Calzolari   Human Language Technology Research Unit, Fondazione Bruno Kessler: Bernardo Magnini Latvia Tilde: Andrejs Vasiļjevs   Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia: Inguna Skadiņa Lithuania Institute of the Lithuanian Language: Jolanta Zabarskaitė Luxembourg Arax Ltd.: Vartkes Goetcherian Malta Department Intelligent Computer Systems, University of Malta: Mike Rosner Netherlands Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University: Jan Odijk   Computational Linguistics, University of Groningen: Gertjan van Noord Norway Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen: Koenraad De Smedt   Department of Informatics, Language Technology Group, University of Oslo: Stephan Oepen Poland Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences: Adam Przepiórkowski, Maciej Ogrodniczuk   University of Łódź: Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Piotr Pęzik   Dept. of Comp. Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, Adam Mickiewicz University: Zygmunt Vetulani Portugal University of Lisbon: António Branco, Amália Mendes   Spoken Language Systems Laboratory, Institute for Systems Engineering and Computers: Isabel Trancoso Romania Faculty of Computer Science, University Alexandru Ioan Cuza of Iași: Dan Cristea   Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Romanian Academy of Sciences: Dan Tufiș Serbia University of Belgrade, Faculty of Mathematics: Duško Vitas, Cvetana Krstev, Ivan Obradović   Pupin Institute: Sanja Vranes Slovakia Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics, Slovak Academy of Sciences: Radovan Garabík Slovenia Jožef Stefan Institute: Marko Grobelnik Spain Barcelona Media: Toni Badia, Maite Melero   Aholab Signal Processing Laboratory, University of the Basque Country: Inma Hernaez Rioja   Center for Language and Speech Technologies and Applications, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya: Asunción Moreno   Department of Signal Processing and Communications, University of Vigo: Carmen García Mateo   Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Núria Bel Sweden Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg: Lars Borin Switzerland Idiap Research Institute: Hervé Bourlard Turkey Tübitek Bilgem: Mehmet Ugur Dogan UK School of Computer Science, University of Manchester: Sophia Ananiadou   Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, Center for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh: Steve Renals   Research Institute of Informatics and Language Processing, University of Wolverhampton: Ruslan Mitkov   Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield: Rob Gaizauskas

http://www.meta-net.eu/vision/reports/meta-net-sra-version_1.0.pdf