META-NET Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020

In everyday communication, Europe’s citizens, business partners and politicians are inevitably confronted with language barriers. Language technology has the potential to overcome these barriers and to provide innovative interfaces to technologies and knowledge. This document presents a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020. The agenda was prepared by META-NET, a European Network of Excellence. META-NET consists of 60 research centres in 34 countries, who cooperate with stakeholders from economy, government agencies, research organisations, non-governmental organisations, language communities and European universities. META-NET’s vision is high-quality language technology for all European languages. “The research carried out in the area of language technology is of utmost importance for the consolidation of Portuguese as a language of global communication in the information society.” — Dr. Pedro Passos Coelho (Prime-Minister of Portugal) “It is imperative that language technologies for Slovene are developed systematically if we want Slovene to flourish also in the future digital world.” — Dr. Danilo Türk (President of the Republic of Slovenia) “For such small languages like Latvian keeping up with the ever increasing pace of time and technological development is crucial. The only way to ensure future existence of our language is to provide its users with equal opportunities as the users of larger languages enjoy. Therefore being on the forefront of modern technologies is our opportunity.” — Valdis Dombrovskis (Prime Minister of Latvia) “Europe’s inherent multilingualism and our scientific expertise are the perfect prerequisites for significantly advancing the challenge that language technology poses. META-NET opens up new opportunities for the development of ubiquitous multilingual technologies.” — Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan (German Minister of Education and Research

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

The future of metadata: open, linked, and multilingual – the YSO case

Peer reviewe

Machine Translation Vs. Multilingual Dictionaries Assessing Two Strategies for the Topic Modeling of Multilingual Text Collections

The goal of this paper is to evaluate two methods for the topic modeling of multilingual document collections: (1) machine translation (MT), and (2) the coding of semantic concepts using a multilingual dictionary (MD) prior to topic modeling. We empirically assess the consequences of these approaches based on both a quantitative comparison of models and a qualitative validation of each method’s potentials and weaknesses. Our case study uses two text collections (of tweets and news articles) in three languages (English, Hebrew, Arabic), covering the ongoing local conflicts between Israeli authorities, settlers, and Palestinian Bedouins in the West Bank. We find that both methods produce a large share of equivalent topics, especially in the context of fairly homogenous news discourse, yet show limited but systematic differences when applied to highly heterogenous social media discourse. While the MD model delivers a more nuanced picture of conflict-related topics, it misses several more peripheral topics, especially those unrelated to the dictionary’s focus, which are picked up by the MT model. Our study is a first step toward instrument validation, indicating that both methods yield valid, comparable results, while method-specific differences remain

The strategic impact of META-NET on the regional, national and international level

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until 2015; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the funding situation for LT topics. The article documents the initiative's work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Machine Translation and Neural Networks for a multilingual EU

This paper presents an overview of the current developments and use of Machine Translation (MT) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT), specifically eTranslation, in the European Institutions. An insight into the state-of-the-art of NMT as currently in development in the Directorate-General for Translation (DG TRAD) of the European Parliament is provided by Pascale Chartier-Brun. Problems in machine translation support requiring further research and development for processing languages with complex morphosyntax are discussed in the outlook. This paper was developed from the presentation “IT integrated environment for optimising the translation of legislative documents in the EP“ by Pascale Chartier-Brun at the workshop “Europäische Rechtslinguistik und Digitale Möglichkeiten / EU Legal Linguistics and Digital Perspectives“, held at the University of Cologne July 7th/8th, 2017

Bridging Language Gaps in Health Information Access: Konkani-English CLIR System for Medical Knowledge

This paper addresses the challenges posed by linguistic diversity in terms of medical information by introducing a Cross-Language Information Retrieval System attuned to the needs of Konkani language information seekers. The proposed system leverages Konkani queries entered by the user, translates them to English, and retrieves the documents using a thesaurus- based approach. Various strategies also have been considered to address the challenges posed by the source language – Konkani which is a minority language spoken in the Indian subcontinent. The proposed approach showcases the potential of combining language technology, information retrieval, and medical domain expertise to bridge linguistic barriers. As healthcare information remains a critical societal need, this work holds promise in facilitating equitable access to medical knowledge

JOINT PROJECTS – EFFECTIVE TOOLS FOR FACILITATING THE DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBAL EDUCATIONAL PROCESSES

Contemporary educational processes have to be in tune with the increasing global tendencies. All the world countries strive to unite under the umbrella term “global village”, which implies interconnected and almost unified political, economic, cultural, juridical and even educational spheres of life.  Special grave challenges are faced by contemporary post-Soviet countries. They have to undergo the post-communist era, to struggle for the survival via radical correctional policy and to interweave globally oriented as well as capitalistically oriented strategies. The greatest challenge is posed to the educational sphere. Many post-Soviet higher educational institutions strive to join the European Higher Education Area. The given institutions try to interflow for the genuine overcoming of the existed “insurmountable” barriers. They consolidate collaboration and cooperation on different research and educational programs. Many newly-created joint projects appear and “play a key role in creating the rightful architecture of modern society. A central point in this process is the enquiry to identify… most urgent problems in national educational systems”(Pourtskhvanidze, 2016), to determine the strategies of functioning in multilingual society and to create a universal educational model of post-communist area via finding a balance between national and worldly. The given paper presents innovative university projects, which belong to two different worlds: the highly developed capitalistic world (Italian international project “Linguaggi e attività Produttive”) and post-Soviet “capitalistically-directed” space (Georgian-Ukrainian “DIMTEGU”). “Linguaggi e attività Produttive” and “DIMTEGU” have different nature and individual ways of development. However, both of them present innovative mechanisms of the preservation of multiculturalism and plurilingualism. The promotion of multiculturalism, facilitation of the preservation of plurilingualism, introduction of multilingual teacher education, development of appropriate curricula and teaching materials, suggestion of the fruitful ways of the adaptation to the global challenges  – these are the major issues of our paper and crucial problems of today’s educational world