European Language Grid: An Overview

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 and the European LT Council for outreach and coordination purposes

European Language Grid: A Joint Platform for the European Language Technology Community

Europe is a multilingual society, in which dozens of languages are spoken. The only option to enable and to benefit from multilingualism is through Language Technologies (LT), i.e., Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies. We describe the European Language Grid (ELG), which is targeted to evolve into the primary platform and marketplace for LT in Europe by providing one umbrella platform for the European LT landscape, including research and industry, enabling all stakeholders to upload, share and distribute their services, products and resources. At the end of our EU project, which will establish a legal entity in 2022, the ELG will provide access to approx. 1300 services for all European languages as well as thousands of data sets

Interoperable Metadata Bridges to the wider Language Technology Ecosystem

One of the objectives of the European Language Grid is to help overcome the fragmentation of the European Language Technology community by bringing together language resources and technologies, information about them, Language Technology consumers, providers and the wider public. This chapter describes the mechanisms ELG has put in place to build interoperable bridges to related initiatives, infrastructures, platforms and repositories in the wider Language Technology landscape. We focus on the different approaches implemented for the exchange of metadata records about, in a generic sense, resources and exemplify them with the help of four use cases through which the ELG catalogue has been further populated. The chapter presents the protocols used for the population processes as well as the adaptations of the ELG metadata schema and platform policies that proved necessary to be able to ingest these new records. Last, we discuss the challenges emerging in large-scale metadata aggregation processes and propose a number of alternative options to address them