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IMMI-CNRS, DGLFLF, LIMSI-CNRS and ELRA / ELDA organize a 2-day conference addressing technology development for the regional languages of France.

On February 19 and 20, 2015, in the Paris area, sixty participants, including representatives of the DGLFLF, and of regional and national authorities and agencies, scientific experts and members of regional languages protection associations in France and Europe, are expected to take part in the conference.

We basically started from the observation that breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing only exist for 1% of the languages spoken in the world, with little or no coverage for most regional languages, in France as well.

However, for some languages like Basque and Catalan, in Spain, among others, combining a strong political will to scientific knowledge and technical know-how, can lead to the rapid development of state-of-the-art technologies, providing them with the necessary language resources and tools. This process also boosts more basic research activities on those languages and allows to tackle the challenge of establishing a real multilingualism taking into account dialectal variants, while enabling the development of strong added-value applications for local authorities (e.g., in the tourism sector).

This conference aims at bringing together linguists, specialists in language processing, representatives of national and regional authorities and offices of regional languages in order to:

• conduct a survey on the development of existing technologies;
• show successful examples of development for some languages;
• propose realistic solutions that can overcome the existing gaps.

The programme of this first conference consists of oral presentations and panel sessions resulting in drafting an action plan, backed up by a series of future conferences, if needed.
http://tlrf2015.sciencesconf.org/program

Contact: tlrf2015@sciencesconf.org
Organizers: CNRS, DGLFLF, ELRA/ELDA, IMMI, LIMSI