Meetings
ELRA attends a number of meetings related to the missions of the association. Quick reports are provided in this section for some of those meetings.
International Expert Meeting in Improving Access to Multilingual Cyberspace
ELRA participated in the International Expert Meeting on Improving Access to Multilingual Cyberspace, held at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on October 28-29, 2014.
This meeting brought together 50 international experts from 26 countries with the objective of discussing and identifying trends, challenges and opportunities for linguistic diversity in cyberspace.
After two days of fruitful discussions, an action plan and recommendations were issued, focusing on the need to promote the linguistic access to cyberspace at the national level, to advocate the technological solutions that facilitate access to multilingual content (MT, HLT tools, etc.) and to establish international cooperation and partnerships to support access to resources. Steps will also be taken to upscale the existing Atlas of Languages in Danger towards a UNESCO World Atlas of Languages.
STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age
ELRA participated in the STOA Workshop: Language equality in the digital age – Towards a Human Language Project, held at the European Parliament in Brussels on January 10, 2017.
Chaired by Lituanian MEP Algirdas Saudargas, the workshop’s objective was to tackle the multilingual and multicutural challenges in Europe today.
The current status and trends of Human Language Technologies (HLT) and the specificities and challenges of the European HLT sector were reviewed. The economic impact of language barriers in Europe and the social implications of imbalanced level of technological support for all European languages were also covered. Finally the workshop addressed the implementation of policies meant to effectively tap the potential of these technologies in order to achieve a fully integrated European.
The workshop was concluded by an interactive session. Khalid Choukri, ELRA Secretary General, brought up the issue of LRs availability, from both technical and legal perspectives, and advocated for a “fair-use” of LRs for research, in the same way this is done in the US and in Asia (see his full statement in the video below from 2:40:53 on).
Watch the stream of the workshop Language Equality in the Digital AgeWorkshop Programme
InfoDay about Language Technologies (April 25, 2017, Madrid, Spain)
The Secretariat of State for the Information Society and the Digital Agenda in Spain has organised an InfoDay on Language Technologies and Machine Translation in Madrid, last April 25.
The Ministry has used this event to promote language technologies among actors from different domains (researchers, industry and public administrations) and to present the opportunities for the public purchase of innovation that have just been announced by the Spanish Government. This event allowed participants to analyse and discuss what language technologies may offer in the development of the Information Technology industry in Spain. This follows upon the Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology that was published in October 2015 (https://plantl.mineco.gob.es/tecnologias-lenguaje/PTL/Paginas/plan-impulso-tecnologias-lenguaje.aspx).
The event was introduced by the Secretary of State José María Lassalle and it was organised around a series of presentations and panels, with a morning devoted to implementations and existing means and tools from the LT Plan, elaborating on the Ministry’s instruments to support language technolgies and on existing and potential developments of the field. Victoria Arranz represented ELRA in the round table about Initiatives and European Networks. The afternoon introduced the language technology use cases, with presentations from representatives of Turism, Health and Sectorial Surveillance in Spain. These presentations gave the audience the opportunity to discuss the large number of applications that LT can have in such different areas and their impact for the industry behind them.