Fostering the Next Generation of European Language Technology: Recent Developments ― Emerging Initiatives ― Challenges and Opportunities

Fostering the Next Generation of European Language Technology: Recent Developments – Emerging Initiatives – Challenges and Opportunities Georg Rehm, Jan Hajič, Josef van Genabith, Andrejs Vasiljevs DFKI GmbH; Charles University in Prague; DFKI GmbH and Saarland University; Tilde Berlin, Germany; Prague, Czech Republic; Saarbrücken, Germany; Riga, Latvia georg.rehm@dfki.de; hajic@ufal.mff.cuni.cz; josef.van_genabith@dfki.de; andrejs@tilde.lv Abstract META-NET is a European network of excellence, founded in 2010, that consists of 60 research centres in 34 European countries. One of the key visions and goals of META-NET is a truly multilingual Europe, which is substantially supported and realised through language technologies. In this article we provide an overview of recent developments around the multilingual Europe topic, we also describe recent and upcoming events as well as recent and upcoming strategy papers. Furthermore, we provide overviews of two new emerging initiatives, the CEF.AT and ELRC activity on the one hand and the Cracking the Language Barrier federation on the other. The paper closes with several suggested next steps in order to address the current challenges and to open up new opportunities. Keywords: Multilinguality, LR National/International Projects, Infrastructural/Policy issues, LR Infrastructures and Architectures 1. Introduction A truly multilingual Europe, which is supported through sophisticated Language Technologies (LT) is still far from being a reality. Since its inception in 2010, it has been one of the key goals of META-NET to foster and stimu- late research and technology development towards this sce- nario. Important milestones along the way were the publica- tion of the META-NET White Papers (Rehm and Uszkoreit, 2012; Rehm et al., 2014) and the Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020 (SRA) (Rehm and Uszkor- eit, 2013) as well as the deployment of META-SHARE (Piperidis, 2012; Piperidis et al., 2014). While all these ac- tivities did have a certain amount of impact in various Eu- ropean countries (Rehm et al., 2016b), new challenges and new opportunities have been emerging in the last two years. In this paper we1 provide an overview of the most recent developments around META-NET and the topic of multi- lingual Europe (Section 2.). We describe two new emerging initiatives that are becoming increasingly important for the community (Section 3.). The main current challenges and opportunities are sketched in Section 4. while Section 5. concludes with several suggested next steps. 2. Recent Developments In the following subsections we briefly describe recent de- velopments, starting with a brief overview of META-NET and its key goals. 2.1. META-NET – A Brief Overview Our multilingual European society imposes societal chal- lenges on political, economic and social integration and inclusion, especially in the creation of the Digital Single Market (DSM) (EC, 2010). LT will bring us closer to 1On behalf of the members of the META-NET Executive Board: Sophia Ananiadou, Núria Bel, António Branco, Koenraad De Smedt, Josef van Genabith (Deputy Chair), Marko Grobelnik, Jan Hajič (Chair), Monica Monachini, Stelios Piperidis, Georg Rehm (Network Manager), Mike Rosner, Tamás Váradi, Andrejs Vasiljevs (Deputy Chair) and François Yvon. this goal. It is the key enabler to boosting growth and …

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