The Competitiveness Analysis of the European Language Technology Market

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3381–3389 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3381 The Competitiveness Analysis of the European Language Technology Market Andrejs Vasiļjevs, Inguna Skadiņa, Indra Sāmīte, Kaspars Kauliņš, Ēriks Ajausks, Jūlija Meļņika and Aivars Bērziņš Tilde Vienibas gatve 75a, Riga, Latvia {fistname.lastname}@tilde.lv Abstract This paper presents the key results of a study on the global competitiveness of the European Language Technology market for three areas – machine translation, speech technology, and cross-lingual search. EU competitiveness is analyzed in comparison to North America and Asia. The study focuses on seven dimensions (research, innovations, investments, market dominance, industry, infrastructure, and Open Data) that have been selected to characterize the language technology market. The study concludes that while Europe still has strong positions in Research and Innovation, it lags behind North America and Asia in scaling innovations and conquering market share. Keywords: competitiveness analysis, language technology market, machine translation, speech technology, cross-lingual search 1. Introduction This paper provides the key results of the competitiveness analysis of the European Language Technology (LT) market in comparison to North America (Unites States and Canada) and Asia (China, Japan, India, South Korea and Singapore). The study is part of broader research contracted by the European Commission (EC) to assess the European Language Technology market and identify potential actions that need to be initiated at the European Union level. The study focused on three LT areas that are of the greatest interest for the EC – machine translation (MT), speech technology, and cross-lingual search. Seven dimensions were selected to assess the key factors for competitiveness in the global LT market: Research, Innovation, Investments, Market dominance, Industry, Infrastructure, and Open Data. A number of criteria were used for each dimension to analyse the comparative position of the European LT market in respect to its main competitors – North America and Asia. A scale from 1 (weakest) to 3 (strongest) was used to rank markets within each dimension. Taking into account limited time and resources allocated to the study its analysis is based on a desk research of secondary sources, data collected from previous studies, and overall economic indicators, such as studies and reports by Common Sense Advisory (Lommel et al., 2016), World Economic Forum (2017); TAUS (Massardo, 2016; Seligman, 2017; TAUS, 2017), CRACKER (SRIA, 2017) and META-NET (2015). The full report of the findings from the study has been published by the European Commission (Vasiļjevs et al., 2019a). Besides an analysis of competitiveness, the report provides an assessment of the supply and demand sides of the European LT market, analysis of LT adoption by public services in the EU, and proposes a value proposition for the automated translation services provided by the European Commission. In this paper we have summarized the key findings of the report in respect to the competitiveness of the EU market. The paper is structured by sections devoted to each of the analysed areas of LT market competitiveness. …

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