European Language Grid: An Overview

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3366–3380 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3366 European Language Grid: An Overview Georg Rehm1, Maria Berger1, Ela Elsholz1, Stefanie Hegele1, Florian Kintzel1, Katrin Marheinecke1, Stelios Piperidis2, Miltos Deligiannis2, Dimitrios Galanis2, Katerina Gkirtzou2, Penny Labropoulou2, Kalina Bontcheva3, David Jones3, Ian Roberts3, Jan Hajič4, Jana Hamrlová4, Lukáš Kačena4, Khalid Choukri5, Victoria Arranz5, Andrejs Vasiļjevs6, Orians Anvari6, Andis Lagzdiņš6, Jūlija Meļņika6, Gerhard Backfried7, Erinç Dikici7, Miroslav Janosik7, Katja Prinz7, Christoph Prinz7, Severin Stampler7, Dorothea Thomas-Aniola7, José Manuel Gómez Pérez8, Andres Garcia Silva8, Cristian Berrío8, Ulrich Germann9, Steve Renals9, Ondrej Klejch9 1 DFKI GmbH, Germany • 2 ILSP/Athena RC, Greece • 3 University of Sheffield, UK • 4 Charles University, Czech Republic • 5 Evaluations and Language Resources Distribution Agency (ELDA), France • 6 Tilde, Latvia • 7 SAIL LABS Technology GmbH, Austria • 8 Expert System Iberia SL, Spain • 9 University of Edinburgh, UK Corresponding author: Georg Rehm – georg.rehm@dfki.de Abstract With 24 official EU and many additional languages, multilingualism in Europe and an inclusive Digital Single Market can only be enabled through Language Technologies (LTs). European LT business is dominated by hundreds of SMEs and a few large players. Many are world-class, with technologies that outperform the global players. However, European LT business is also fragmented – by nation states, languages, verticals and sectors –, significantly holding back its impact. The European Language Grid (ELG) project addresses this fragmentation by establishing the ELG as the primary platform for LT in Europe. The ELG is a scalable cloud platform, providing, in an easy-to-integrate way, access to hundreds of commercial and non-commercial LTs for all European languages, including running tools and services as well as data sets and resources. Once fully operational, it will enable the commercial and non-commercial European LT community to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets into the ELG, to deploy them through the grid, and to connect with other resources. The ELG will boost the Multilingual Digital Single Market towards a thriving European LT community, creating new jobs and opportunities. Furthermore, the ELG project organises two open calls for up to 20 pilot projects. It also sets up 32 National Competence Centres (NCCs) and the European LT Council (LTC) for outreach and coordination purposes. Keywords: LR Infrastructures and Architectures, LR National/International Projects, Tools, Systems, Applications, Web Services 1. Introduction With 24 official EU languages and many additional ones, multilingualism, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communi- cation in Europe as well as an inclusive EU Digital Single Market can only be enabled and firmly established through Language Technologies (LTs) (Rehm, 2016). The European LT industry is dominated by hundreds of SMEs and a few large players. Many are world-class, with technologies that outperform the global players. However, European LT busi- ness is also fragmented – by nation states, languages, do- mains and sectors (Vasiljevs et al., 2019) –, significantly holding back its impact. In addition, many European lan- guages …

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