The European Language Technology Landscape in 2020: Language-Centric and Human-Centric AI for Cross-Cultural Communication in Multilingual Europe

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3322–3332 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3322 The European Language Technology Landscape in 2020: Language-Centric and Human-Centric AI for Cross-Cultural Communication in Multilingual Europe Georg Rehm1, Katrin Marheinecke1, Stefanie Hegele1, Stelios Piperidis2, Kalina Bontcheva3, Jan Hajič4, Khalid Choukri5, Andrejs Vasiļjevs6, Gerhard Backfried7, Christoph Prinz7, José Manuel Gómez Pérez8, Luc Meertens9, Paul Lukowicz1, Josef van Genabith1, Andrea Lösch1, Philipp Slusallek1, Morten Irgens10, Patrick Gatellier11, Joachim Köhler12, Laure Le Bars13, Dimitra Anastasiou14, Albina Auksoriūtė15, Núria Bel16, António Branco17, Gerhard Budin18, Walter Daelemans19, Koenraad De Smedt20, Radovan Garabík21, Maria Gavriilidou2, Dagmar Gromann18, Svetla Koeva22, Simon Krek23, Cvetana Krstev24, Krister Lindén25, Bernardo Magnini26, Jan Odijk27, Maciej Ogrodniczuk28, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson29, Mike Rosner30, Bolette Sandford Pedersen31, Inguna Skadiņa32, Marko Tadić33, Dan Tufiş34, Tamás Váradi35, Kadri Vider36, Andy Way37, François Yvon38 1 DFKI GmbH, Germany • 2 ILSP/Athena RC, Greece • 3 University of Sheffield, UK • 4 Charles University, Czech Republic • 5 ELDA, France • 6 Tilde, Latvia • 7 SAIL LABS Technology GmbH, Austria • 8 Expert System Iberia SL, Spain • 9 CrossLang, Belgium • 10 Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway • 11 Thales Group, France • 12 Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany • 13 SAP, Germany • 14 Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg • 15 Institute of the Lithuanian Language, Lithuania • 16 University Pompeu Fabra, Spain • 17 University of Lisbon, Portugal • 18 University of Vienna, Austria • 19 University of Antwerp, Belgium • 20 University of Bergen, Norway • 21 Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia • 22 Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria • 23 Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia • 24 University of Belgrade, Serbia • 25 University of Helsinki, Finland • 26 FBK, Italy • 27 Utrecht University, The Netherlands • 28 ICS, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland • 29 University of Iceland, Iceland • 30 University of Malta, Malta • 31 University of Copenhagen, Denmark • 32 University of Latvia, Latvia • 33 University of Zagreb, Croatia • 34 Romanian Academy of Sciences, Romania • 35 MTA Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungary • 36 University of Tartu, Estonia • 37 Dublin City University and ADAPT Centre, Ireland • 38 CNRS, LIMSI, France Corresponding author: Georg Rehm – georg.rehm@dfki.de Abstract Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe’s specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT …

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