wiadomości

Informacje dostępne są jedynie w języku angielskim:

Introduction
The role of English as lingua franca in the digital world is constantly decreasing.  It is estimated that it currently makes up less than 30% of total web content.  New regions and economies are progressing faster, the fastest growing languages on the web being Chinese, Brazilian-Portuguese and Arabic.  Europe itself has some 60-plus languages, 23 of which are official EU working languages.  Around 40% of the worldwide translation market and its associated professionals are based in Europe but some analysts suggest that only 25% of the information worth translating is indeed translated, the main obstacle being cost/time constraints.  However, while multilingualism would seem to have a pretty high price tag, a mono-lingual/cultural environment is simply unthinkable.

DG INFSO is well placed to play a more pro-active role in this respect.  It has a good mix of policy, research, innovation and audiovisual activties, and with all this in mind, we would like to prepare a Work programme for the coming years which proposes real solutions for online multilingual content.  At the time of writing, "Language Technologies" (LT) is a candidate component of a challenge which includes themes such as digital content and preservation, and information management.

The scale of future LT operations is by no means fixed but our ambition is to address a wider community and a broader range of topics than in recent years, where we concentrated on machine translation and automated acquisition of language resources.
Our mission and problem area

Our goal is to stimulate ICT-based cross-lingual communication, collaboration and participation and by doing so help to build the single European digital information space.   By improving the ability of ICT systems to master and process human language(s) we could create technologies that help make sense of digital content, while overcoming language barriers in business, social and interpersonal communication.

What we have done so far
Language Technologies appeared on the FP7 research agenda for the first time in 2009.
The 4th ICT call for proposals featured "Language-based Interaction", geared towards machine translation and the automated acquisition of language resources.  An amount of €26 million was set aside for this. There was a good response to the Call and the concomitant CIP Call (50 proposals in total).  There was a particularly high interest in "automatic acquisition of multilingual resources" but less so for the topic "multilingual web content management". EuroMatrix+ is the most significant project in the area of language technologies at this point in time.
Projects selected under the 4th Call are now in the final stages of negotiation.  You can have a look at brief outlines of these projects, together with more in-depth descriptions of our other projects on our portfolio page.

What we would like to do - 2011-2012 Research Agenda
Within the LT objective of the 2011-2012 work programme, we intend to place emphasis on multi- (including cross-) lingual technologies and applications.  Individual projects will cater for multiple languages and deal with written and/or spoken languages as appropriate.  Language independent methods and techniques will be suppported whenever applicable. 

By way of explanation, the candidate topics we would like to explore follow these four broad action lines:

• Content production and management: exploitation of language knowledge embedded in documents, web pages, audiovisual objects, social media, etc., along the content creation, management (including translation) and publishing chain.
• Information access and mining: a key component of making sense of content - how language technologies can best help finding, interpreting, categorizing, filtering, summarising ..... information expressed in written or spoken human language.
• Natural interaction: in particular conversational systems supporting spontaneous communication between humans and ICT services, products and appliances.
• Horizontal and prospective actions cutting across action lines: for example, shared and reusable language resources; community based repositories and services; metadata and linguistic standards for interoperability; support for evaluation; community building and mobilisation to pursue widely supported agendas; actions geared towards new players/participants (especially SME's); actions to stimulate user/industry/academia partnerships; promotion of best practices and technology transfer, and so on....

How can you contribute?
In November 2009 two very successful two-day meetings were held with invited representatives of academia, research and industry to hear their ideas and discuss ways to reach our goals.   Many interesting ideas were tabled which will provide valuable input to our work programme.

If you would like to contribute to our endeavour, we invite you to submit your brief statement (1 page maximum) along the following lines:

• What? - A crucially important 'challenge' (innovation/breakthrough .....) that if successfully tacked would make a significant difference, and key related tasks (or at least the first, most urgent steps).
• Who? - Whether the proposed actions are backed by adequate human, technical, etc resources in Europe.  Are we trying to establish or consolidate European leadership in the field, or are we reclaiming ground lost to competitors?
• When? - What is the expected time-to-maturity and impact of the technologies that would result from the proposed work?
• How much? - What is the likely scale of investment (€ -> €€€€€) in the coming 3-4 years?  What is the expected EU added-value? Can this effort be realistically shared with industry and/or national agencies?

While the scope of actions you propose is not constrained, please bear in mind that for obvious reasons your "challenge" cannot encompass a full end-to-end programme worth 50-100 M euro within the next 3 years.

You can send your input (1 page per challenge, maximum 2 challenges) by e-mail to us at INFSO-E1@ec.europa.eu with "WP 2011-12" in the subject line.

It should reach us no later than Friday 29 January 2010.

The outcome of this consultation and the main orientations and priorities for the LT work programme will be presented during our Language Technology Days, which will take place in Luxembourg on 22-23 March 2010.
Further information on this event is available on our LT Days webpage and registration will open in January 2010.


Zobacz również: Rezolucja Parlamentu Europejskiego z dnia 24 marca 2009 r. w sprawie wielojęzyczności: Atut dla Europy i wspólne zobowiązanie (2008/2225(INI))