the meta-net strategic research agenda for multilingual europe 2020

Co-funded by the 7th Framework Programme and the ICT Policy Support Programme of the European Commission through the contracts T4ME, CESAR, METANET4U, META-NORD (grant agreements no. 249119, 271022, 270893, 270899).

The META-NET Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe

Georg Rehm

Network Manager META-NET DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), Berlin, Germany

[email protected]

The Hungarian Language in the Digital Age – Budapest, Hungary

January 18, 2013

Outline

q  Introduction

q  META-SHARE: An Infrastructure for Research & Innovation

q  Language White Paper Series: Europe’s Languages in the Digital Age

q  The META-NET Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe

q  Conclusions – Next Steps

http://www.meta-net.eu 2

Multilingual Europe

3 http://www.meta-net.eu

q  Challenge: Providing each language community with the most advanced technologies for communication and information so that maintaining their mother tongue does not turn into a disadvantage.

q  While research has made considerable progress in recent years, the pace of progress is not fast enough to meet the challenge within the next 10-20 years.

q  All stakeholders – researchers, LT user and provider industries, language communities, funding programmes, policy makers – should team up for a major dedicated push.

Objectives

META-NET is a network of excellence dedicated to fostering the tech-nological foundations of the European multilingual information society.


Four EU-Funded Projects

q  Initial project: T4ME (FP7; 13 partners, 10 countries)

q  Three ICT-PSP consortia since Feb. 2011: CESAR, METANET4U, META-NORD

q  All EU member states and several non-member states covered.

q  META-NET in Jan. 2013: 60 members in 34 countries.


http://www.meta-net.eu/members

META-SHARE META-NET


META-SHARE at a Glance


q  Open exchange infrastructure for language resources and tools.

q  Language resources and tools are documented, uploaded, stored in repositories, catalogued, can be downloaded, shared, discussed.

q  Improve their visibility, documentation, identification, availability, preservation, interoperability.

q  Long-term goal: boost research, technology and innovation through wide availability, pooling, openness and sharing of resources.

q  Repositories store and maintain inventories of resources and tools.

q  Metadata inventories are exported and harvested in the network.

q  Currently 19 repositories up and running; ~2.000 LRs available.

Language White Paper Series META-VISION


Language White Paper Series


q  “Europe’s Languages in the Digital Age”. q  Reports on the state of our languages in

the digital age and the level of support through language technology.

q  Series covers 30 languages. q  Key communication instruments to

address decision makers and journalists. q  Inform about societal and technological

problems and challenges as well as economic opportunities.

q  >2 years in the making. q  >200 national experts as contributors. q  >8.000 copies printed and distributed to

politicians and journalists.

MT


English

good

French, Spanish

moderate fragmentary

Catalan, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish,

Romanian

weak or no support

Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Galician,

Greek, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithu-anian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese,

Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Swedish

excellent

Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German,

Italian, Portuguese, Spanish


Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Galician, Greek,

Hungarian, Irish, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene,

Swedish

weak or no support

Croatian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Romanian

excellent

English

good

Spee

ch

English

good

Dutch, French, German, Italian,

Spanish


Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak,

Slovene, Swedish

weak or no support

Croatian, Estonian, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Serbian

excellent

English

good

Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian,

Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish


Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Galician,

Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene

Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese

weak/no support excellent

Res

ourc

es

Text

Ana

lysi

s

Press Campaign

q  Headline of press release: At Least 21 European Languages in Danger of Digital Extinction.

q  Sent out to journalists, politicians and other stakeholder groups on the European Day of Languages (Sept. 26, 2012).

q  Overwhelmed by the huge interest in the topic and our key findings! q  600+ mentions in the press. q  50+ interviews with META-NET representatives (television, radio). q  News came in from 40+ countries in 35+ different languages. q  City with the most visitors of the META-NET website: Brussels! q  Two Parliamentary Questions in the European Parliament on the

“digital extinction of languages” topic.


Response: Examples

q  Austria: Der Standard. q  Denmark: Politiken, Berlingske Tidende. q  Finland: Tiede. q  Germany: Heise Newsticker, Süddeutsche Zeitung. q  Greece: in.gr, Πρώτο Θέµα, Prosilipsis. q  Hungary: Origo. q  Iceland: Fréttablaðið, Morgunblaðið. q  Italy: Wired. q  Norway: Computerworld. q  Slovenia: Delo, Dnevnik, Demokracija. q  Serbia: Politika. q  Spain: El Mundo. q  UK: Huffington Post. q  USA: Mashable, NBC News, Reddit.


Strategic Research Agenda META-VISION


Three Ingredients

17

Appropriate Programme

Vision & Agenda

Appropriate Actors

Research & Commercialisation

Appropriate Support

Funding

http://www.meta-net.eu

Strategic Research Agenda


q  Addresses the problems we found when preparing the white papers.

q  Three priority research themes and application/innovation scenarios.

q  Can put Europe ahead of its competitors in this technology area.

q  >190 contributors; >2 years.

q  Presented and discussed at 83 conferences and major workshops.

q  Final version ready on Dec. 1, 2012.

q  http://www.meta-net.eu/sra

SRA: Contents – Brief Glimpse


q  Set the stage and describe the Euro-pean situation, the needs and the LT research and industry.

q  Discuss the state of IT, predictions and mega-trends.

q  Our technology vision for 2020.

q  Select and specify priority themes.

q  Suggest a model for speeding up innovation.

q  Outline proposals for the organisation of research and innovation.

Priority Themes: 3 + 2

q  We decided on priority themes that (a) support technology progress, (b) lead to solutions that European society needs and (c) solutions from which European industry will benefit as users or as providers.

§  Translingual Cloud §  Social Intelligence and e-Participation

§  Socially-Aware Interactive Assistants

q  Two additional themes:

§  European Service Platform for Language Technologies

§  Core Technologies for Language Analysis and Production


Priority Research Theme 1: Translingual Cloud

Anydevice

Target groups: European citizen, language professional, organisations, companies, European

institutions, software applications

Multiple target formats

Single accesspoint

Automatic translation and interpretation

Language checking Post-editing Workbenches for creative

translations Novel translation and authoring

workflows

Quality assurance Computer-supported human

translation Multilingual content production and

text authoring Trusted service centre (privacy,

confidentiality, security of source data)

Services and Technologies:

Crosslingual communication, translation and search

Real-time subtitling, voice-over generation and translating speech from live events

Mobile interactive interpretation

Multilingual content production (media, web, technical, legal documents)

Showcases: translingual spaces for ambient translation

Applications:

Written (twitter, blog, article, newspaper,text with/without metadata etc.) orspoken input (spontaneous spoken

language, video/audio, multiple speakers)

Modular combination of analysis, transfer

and generation models

From very fast but lower quality to slower but very

high quality (including instant quality upgrades)

Exploiting strong monolingual analysis

and generation methods and resources

Multiple target formats

Domain, task and genre specialisation

models

Extending translation with

semantic data and linked open data

PT1: Translingual Cloud

q  Europe has a big need for translations of publishable quality. q  Focus on high-quality translation. q  New research paradigms

§  Inclusion of professional translators into the research process

§  Inclusion of technologists into research on human translation processes

q  Different technological approaches §  Stronger emphasis on the properties of

individual languages §  A central role for semantics

q  Methods for specific genres & domains


Priority Research Theme 2: Social Intelligence and e-Participation

From shallow to deep, from coarse-grained to

detailed processing techniques

Making language technologies interoperable

with knowledge representa-tion and the semantic web

“Semantification” of the web: tight integration with the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data

Mapping large, heterogeneous, unstructured volumes of online content to structured, actionable

representations

Unleashing social intelligence by detecting and monitoring opinions,

demands, needs and problems

Target groups: European citizen, European institutions, discussion

participants, companies

Make use of the wisdom of the

crowds

Improved efficiency and

quality of decision processes

Understanding influence diffusion across social media

especially social media, comments, blogs, forums

decision-relevant information

support

sentiment analysis and opinion mining including the temporal dimension)

cues

from arbitrary online content

visualising discussions and opinion statements


collective deliberation and e-participation

-wide deliberation on pressing issues

and processes; modeling evolution of opinions

analysis technologies

Applications:

PT2: Social Intelligence

q  Better decisions by monitoring social media q  Inclusion of citizens into collective decision processes q  Opinion formation, consensus building, decision making q  Evolution of new solutions q  New forms of democracy: e-democracy,

massive participation, transparency q  Dialogues and debates across language

boundaries and across parties, political alliances, social classes

q  Better than binary voting q  Documented transparent

decision processes


Priority Research Theme 3: Socially-Aware Interactive Assistants

Interacting naturally

with and in groups

Learning and

forgetting information

Adaptable to the user’s needs and preferences and the environment

Include human-computer, human-artificial agent and

computer-mediated human-human communication

Proactive, self-aware,

user-adaptable

Interacts naturally with humans, in any

language and modality

Can be personalised to individual communication

abilities including special needs

Can learn incrementally from all interactions and

other sources of information

recognition

and synthesis, providing expressive voices

understanding

incremental conversational speech

models of human communication

inter-dependencies

priority themes


Applications:

dialogue systems

environment

modalities (visual, tactile, haptic) verbal/non-verbal behaviour, social context

ments, any

vocabulary

recovery,self-

assessment

Multilingualcapabilities

Providers of operational and research technologies and services

ResearchCentres

EuropeanInstitutions

Othercompanies (SMEs,

startups etc.)

NationalLanguageInstitutions

LanguageTechnologyProviders

LanguageService

ProvidersUniversities

EuropeanInstitutions

ResearchCentres

Public Administrations Enterprises LT User

Industries UniversitiesEuropeanCitizens

Beneficiaries/users of the platform

Interfaces (web, speech, mobile etc.)

Priority Research Theme 1:Translingual

Cloud

Priority Research Theme 2:Social Intelligence& e-Participation

Priority Research Theme 3:Socially Aware

Interactive Assistants

European Service Platform for Language Technologies(Cloud or Sky Computing Platform)

Multilingualtechnologies

Textanalytics

Textgeneration

Languagechecking

Sentimentanalysis

Named entityrecognition

Summari-sation

Knowledge accessand management

Information andrelation extraction

LanguageProcessing

LanguageUnderstanding

Knowledge

Emotion/Sentiment

Data protectionToolsData SetsResourcesComponentsMetadataStandardsInterfacesAPIsCataloguesQuality AssuranceData Import/ExportInput/OutputStoragePerformanceAvailabilityScalability

Featu

res

Core Resources & Technologies

Icelandic

French

CatalanItalian

Maltese

Greek

Bulgarian

Romanian

Serbian

Croatian

Slovene Hungarian

Slovak

Czech

German

Danish Lithuanian

Latvian

Estonian

Finnish

Swedish

Norwegian

Basque

SpanishPortuguese

Galician

English

Irish

PolishDutch

Polish

English

Irish

Icelandic

Italian

Maltese

Greek

Bulgarian

Romanian

SerbianCroatian

SloveneHungarian

Slovak

Czech

German

Dutch

DanishLithuanian

Latvian

Estonian

Finnish

Swedish

Norwegian

Basque

Spanish

Portuguese

Galician

French

Catalan


Conclusions and Next Steps META-NET


Conclusions and Next Steps

q  Europe is extremely interested in and passionate about its languages. q  Our Strategic Research Agenda for LT research and innovation can put

Europe ahead of its competitors in this technology area. q  Provides useful and attractive solutions to European society, at the same

time creating huge business opportunities for European industry. q  Now is the time to move forward with a continent-wide, systematic push

and to invest in strategic research. A modest investment is required. q  This push will generate a countless number of opportunities.

q  H2020 and CEF can provide sufficient resources to make our visions for Europe’s citizens and economy a reality.

q  SRA press campaign, launch on Jan. 21, 2013. q  META-SHARE and SRA launch event on Jan. 24/25, 2013 in Berlin.


Gartner Hype Cycle 2012

13 of the 48 emerging technologies are

language technologies!

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