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Language technologies in the EU
What is the state of play with regard to language technologies in the European Union? Just how can we cope with all the content on the Web and make it available to interested people, regardless of the language(s) they speak and understand? The obvious answer is to teach computers how to understand and process written and spoken human language.
Human Language Technologies, or HLT, cover many research groups and disciplines including natural language processing, speech technology, machine translation, information extraction, and so on. If all these strands could be brought together in a meaningful way then perhaps computers could make sense of our many languages.
The European Commission has supported HLT for some 40 years now. There was a lot of sustained effort throughout 1980-1990 which resulted in some pioneering Machine Translation and Translation Memory technologies. The EC did not simply help fund HLT projects but developed and deployed machine translation systems and translation memories to handle the ever growing amount of internal information to be translated.
After a period of relatively low visibility, EC support for HLT is now being revived due to renewed political commitment following the enlargement of the EU. From the EC's point of view the addition of eleven official languages has meant that translators have more and more work and it is becoming almost impossible to keep pace. Not only EU enlargement but globalisation has had an impact. More and more commercial transactions are being done online and there are more consumers using the Web that do not speak English than those who do. While a few years ago English may have been seen as the lingua-franca of the Web, the amount of online content in other languages, especially from Asian countries and the Arabic world, has exploded, leaving English-language content covering only 29% of what is available online. Recent e-commerce statistics indicate that two out of three EU customers only buy in their own language. This suggests that language is a significant barrier to a truly Europe-wide digital single market. Of course, language barriers do not only impact on e-commerce activities, but also on access to virtually all online services.
In view of the above, European support has been stepped up, starting with the publication of the Communication "Multilingualism: an asset for Europe and a shared commitment", and being followed by the creation of our Unit: Language technologies, machine translation. Europe, with its people and skills, and variety of languages accounts for 50% of the worldwide language services market, and the experience and expertise is there to provide tangible results. However, there are several R&D issues which must be addressed in the immediate future in order to better meet the challenge. In recognition of the importance of languages in the digital age, the Work Programme 2011-2012 has a specific challenge "Technologies for Digital Content and Languages". It aims to make online content accessible for all, for citizens and businesses alike.
The Work Programme foresees a dozen calls for proposals over the next two years. The Call for Objective 4.1 – SME action on Digital Content and Languages was published on 1st February 2011, with 35 MEUR available for funding. The proposals retained for funding under this call are currently under negotiation and are expected to start in summer 2012. Some 90 proposals were submitted in the 7th Call for proposals. Funding amounting to 50 MEUR was available for research activities under Objective 4.2 – Language Technologies. Most of these proposals started in the last quarter of 2011.
Note that from the total amount of funding which was available in recent HLT Calls, 40% has been earmarked for SMEs. The European Commission wishes to promote SMEs in their international activities. Increased internationalisation reinforces growth and enhances competitiveness of SMEs. More information including the results of a recent study on the internationalisation of SMEs can be found on the DG Enterprise SME web page.
Challenge 4: Technologies for Digital Content and Languages
Challenge 4 focuses on managing digital content and the knowledge contained therein. It aims to do this by making access to online content easy and reliable for all, whether on an inter-personal or business level. The Challenge aims to bridge language barriers by allowing information access, communication and collaboration in your own language. It also addresses the problems of the ever growing amount of data and how to deal with it effectively and accurately.
Open Calls
There are currently no open Calls.
Please note that information on open Calls together with full documentation is published on CORDIS. Below we provide links to the full Work Programme as well as Challenge 4-specific abstracts.
Further information
An LT Business Platform based on input and discussion with people directly from industry has been set up. You can find more information on our business platform page.
- Business Platform for Language Technologies
- ICT Work Programme 2011-2012
- Challenge 4 excerpts from the Work Programme 2011-2012 (PDF 94 KB)
Related Events
An information and showcase event will be organised in the second half of 2012. This will give information on upcoming calls for proposals and showcase projects' work. More details will be available on this page nearer the time.
For full details of previous information days including the agendas, please have a look at our "Related events" page.
This page is maintained by: Susan Fraser