META-NET and META-SHARE: Language Technology for Europe

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).

META-NET and META-SHARE: Language Technology for Europe

Georg Rehm

Network Manager META-NET DFKI, Germany [email protected]

CHAT 2012 Workshop – Madrid, Spain

June 22, 2012

Outline

q  Introduction

q  META-SHARE

q  Language White Paper Series

q  Strategic Research Agenda

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 Funded Projects

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

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

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

q  META-NET in June 2012: 60 members in 34 countries.


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

META-SHARE META-SHARE


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 13 repositories up and running; ~1.300 LRs available.


Metadata Descriptions

q  Unit of description: LRs/LTs and related objects q  Metadata descriptions for

§  Sets of text/audio/video etc. files (corpora) §  Sets of lexical entries (lexical/conceptual resources) §  Tools or services etc.

q  Components group together elements and relations §  General components common to all LR types §  LR type-specific components

q  Profiles for each LR type are built upon components


Ontology excerpt


Current Contents


650 586

29 4 Resource types

corpus

lexicalConceptualResource

toolService

languageDescrip<on

503

391

204 202

99

76

41

40

38 36 30

28 27

25 21

20

293

Distribu/on per Language English Spanish French German Italian Chinese Dutch Portuguese Greek Swedish Catalan Arabic Japanese Romanian Danish Polish Other

q  Several organizations outside META-NET want to set up their own META-SHARE repositories (e.g., JRC Optima Activity).

q  Incoming resources from CESAR, METANET4U and META-NORD and also from additional initiatives (collaboration agreements with >45 EU-funded projects).

q  ELRA will adopt META-SHARE as the central model for LR sharing and will provide services in its operation.

q  META-SHARE Version 3.0 to be released in September 2012.


Recent Developments

EXCITEMENT

Language White Paper Series META-VISION


Language White Papers


q  Key communication instruments to address decision makers and journalists.

q  Cover all EU languages (30 volumes). q  Report on the state of a language

(general, social, strategic and technological aspects) and the level of support through language technology.

q  Inform target group about societal and technological problems and challenges as well as economic opportunities.

q  Published by Springer. q  PDF versions available for free.

30 Languages Covered

q  Basque q  Bulgarian* q  Catalan q  Czech* q  Danish* q  Dutch* q  English* q  Estonian* q  Finnish* q  French*

q  Galician q  German* q  Greek* q  Hungarian* q  Icelandic q  Irish* q  Italian* q  Latvian* q  Lithuanian* q  Maltese*

q  Norwegian q  Polish* q  Portuguese* q  Romanian* q  Serbian q  Slovak* q  Slovene* q  Spanish* q  Swedish* q  Croatian


* = Official EU language

A few Numbers …

q  >160 national experts contributed as authors or co-authors (ca. 5 per language on average)

q  >50 additional experts have contributed data and information

q  >8,000 copies will be printed and distributed by META-NET


Cross-Lingual Ranking

q  Journalists and politicians need simple and clear messages. q  For four application areas, each language is assigned to one of five

clusters, ranging from excellent LT support to weak/no support:

1.  Machine Translation 2.  Speech Processing

3.  Text Analysis

4.  Resources q  Finalised at a meeting with

representatives of all 30 languages (Oct. 21/22, 2011).


MT (top) & Speech Processing (bottom)


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, Lithuanian, 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

Text Analysis (top) & Resources (bottom)


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

Europe’s Languages and LT


Dutch French German Italian

Spanish

Catalan Czech

Finnish Hungarian

Polish Portuguese

Swedish

Basque Bulgarian

Danish Galician

Greek Norwegian Romanian

Slovak Slovene

Croatian Estonian Icelandic

Irish Latvian

Lithuanian Maltese Serbian

English

good support through Language Technology

weak or no support


q  When it comes to Language Technology support, there are massive differences between Europe’s languages and technology areas.

q  Language Technology support for English is ahead of any other language – but far from being perfect.

q  For 16 of 30 languages, Language Technology support is only fragmentary, very weak or non-existent!

q  We now have a list of gaps and needs for all 30 languages which need to be addressed in the years to come.

Key Results


q  On June 20 we launched a new version of the Language White Paper website: http://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers.

q  Ca. 20 of the 30 white papers online (PDF).

q  First batch of printed copies (published by Springer) will be available soon.

q  New volumes upcoming (such as, “Euro- pean Sign Languages in the Digital Age”).

q  Dissemination of printed volumes to politicians and journalists to start in July.

Recent Developments

Strategic Research Agenda META-VISION


Shared Vision and SRA

q  Mobilize researchers, users and providers of LT for cooperation and collaboration to initiate and support a large-scale joint action to §  Building a community around Language Technology in Europe (META), §  Creating a shared vision,

§  Preparing a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020, to be presented to national/international politicians, funding agencies, decision makers.


Appropriate Programme

Vision & Agenda

Appropriate Actors

Commercial-

isation & Research

Appropriate Support

Funding

From Visions to the SRA

q  Three Vision Groups brought together researchers, developers, integrators and (corporate or professional) users of LT-based products, services and applications (ca. 25 members each).

q  Collected domain-specific visions and prepared individual reports.

q  Vision Group Translation and Localisation

q  Vision Group Media and Information Services

q  Vision Group Interactive Systems

28 http://www.meta-net.eu http://www.meta-net.eu 28

§  July 23, 2010 Berlin, Germany §  September 28, 2010 Brussels, Belgium §  April 7/8, 2011 Prague, Czech Republic

§  September 10, 2010 Paris, France §  October 15, 2010 Barcelona, Spain §  April 1, 2011 Vienna, Austria

§  September 10, 2010 Paris, France §  October 5, 2010 Prague, Czech Republic §  March 28, 2011 Utrecht, The Netherlands

Steps taken towards the SRA

q  Many suggestions by: Vision Group members; META-NET; META. q  Additional input in meetings, workshops, discussions etc. q  Language White Papers: research gaps; funding situation etc. q  We screened the Strategic Research Agendas of other initiatives. q  We discussed procedures, input, structure and content of the SRA in

four meetings of the META Technology Council. §  Brussels, Belgium, November 16, 2010 §  Venice, Italy, May 25, 2011

§  Berlin, Germany, September 30, 2011

§  Brussels, Belgium, June 19, 2012


From Visions to the SRA


Vision Paper

Vision Group Translation and

Localisation Report

Vision Group Interactive

Systems Report

Vision Group Media and

Information Services Report

Priority Themes Paper

Expert meeting minutes



Strategic Research Agenda

2010 2011 2012

Priority Research Themes


LT 2020 Vision and Priority Themes for Language Technology Research in Europe until the Year 2020 Towards the META-NET Strategic Research Agenda

The development of this paper has been funded by the Seventh Framework Programme and the ICT Policy Support Programme of the Euro-pean Commission under contracts T4ME (Grant Agreement 249119), CESAR (Grant Agreement 271022), METANET4U (Grant Agreement 270893) and META-NORD (Grant Agreement 270899).

Do you have comments, ideas or suggestions

with regard to the content of this document?

Please send them to [email protected] or

discuss them online: http://www.meta-net.eu/sra.

META

q  META-NET is a network of excellence.

q  META is an open and growing strategic technology alliance: Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance.

§  630+ members, including W3C, Google, Microsoft, GALA, research centres, LT companies, many EC funded projects etc.

§  Main goal: to support our Strategic Research Agenda.

§  Join us! http://www.meta-net.eu/join


Next Steps

q  Solid first version of SRA to be available online on July 2 – we need as much feedback as possible! Check our website!

q  Disseminate the Language White Papers widely. q  Making META-SHARE sustainable. q  Disseminate the SRA widely – meet with national research planners,

funders, policy makers and inform them about the strategy. q  Roll out META-SHARE for the whole LT community in Sep. 2012. q  Upcoming opportunities can provide sufficient resources to make

our visions for Europe’s citizens and economy, as described in the SRA, a reality (Horizon 2020 and Connecting Europe Facility, CEF).


Q/A

Thank you very much! [email protected] http://www.meta-net.eu http://www.facebook.com/META.Alliance

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