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 (NCCs) and the European LT Council (LTC) for outreach and coordination purposes

CoNLL 2017 shared task: Multilingual parsing from raw text to universal dependencies

The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2017, one of two tasks was devoted to learning dependency parsers for a large number of languages, in a real-world setting without any gold-standard annotation on input. All test sets followed a unified annotation scheme, namely that of Universal Dependencies. In this paper, we define the task and evaluation methodology, describe data preparation, report and analyze the main results, and provide a brief categorization of the different approaches of the participating systems

Dinoflagellate cysts from the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary at Ouled Haddou, southeastern Rif, Morocco: biostratigraphy, paleoenvironments and paleobiogeography

A palynological investigation of a section dated by foraminifera, at Ouled Haddou, south-eastern Rifian Corridor, northern Morocco, revealed a rich and well-preserved dinoflagellate cyst assemblage that allowed a palynological separation of Maastrichtian from Danian deposits. The gradual change of the dinoflagellate cyst assemblages and the biostratigraphic resolution attained, suggest that the studied Maastrichtian-Danian section is continuous. The recognition of the latest Maastrichtian and earliest Danian is based on global dinoflagellate cyst events, including the first occurrence of the latest Maastrichtian species Disphaerogena carposphaeropsis, Glaphyrocysta perforata, and Manumiella seelandica, the latest Maastrichtian acme of Manumiella seelandica, and the first occurrence of the earliest Danian markers Carpatella cornuta, Damassadinium californicum, Eisenackia circumtabulata, Membranilarnacia tenella and Senoniasphaera inornata. The Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary is placed above the latest Maastrichtian events, mainly immediately above the acme of M. seelandica and below the earliest Danian events, particularly below the first occurrences of C. cornuta and D. californicum. The biostratigraphic interpretations are based on a comparison with calibrated dinoflagellate cyst ranges from several reference sections, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere middle latitudes. The Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary is not marked by a mass extinction of dinoflagellate cyst species, but shows important changes in the relative abundances of different species or groups of morphologically related species. These changes are paleoenvironmentally controlled. The peridinioid assemblage suggests deposition in a subtropical to warm temperate province. One dinoflagellate cyst species, Phelodinium elongatum, is formally described