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    You are here: Home Welcome to Language Technology World (April 30th, 2010)

    Welcome to Language Technology World (April 30th, 2010)

    Last updated: April 30th, 2010

    LT World is the most comprehensive WWW information service and knowledge source on the wide range of technologies that deal with human language. The service is provided by the German Language Technology Competence Center at DFKI. Contents will constantly be improved. Please send corrections and pointers to missing information to [email protected].

     


    Short News
    Programmes & Calls

    New Initiative META pushes for
    Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

    A core component of the European Union is a common market with a single information space that works with two dozens national and many regional languages. This ambitious endeavour is an unprecedented social experiment. If it works, the multicultural union of nations will prosper and serve as a model for the peaceful and egalitarian cooperation of peoples in other parts of the world. If it fails, Europe will be forced to choose between sacrificing cultural identities and economic defeat.

    The two major challenges are preserving the European cultural and linguistic diversity in the united information and knowledge society and, securing at affordable costs the free flow of information and thought across language boundaries in the resulting single information space. Economically, these challenges can only be met by employing advanced information technology. While leading experts agree that eventually language technology will be able to support both the survival of lesser-resourced languages in the information society and high quality translation among all human languages, current progress is much too slow.

    In order to prevent a competitive disadvantage and to turn European linguistic diversity into an economic asset, a major technology push is needed. Such a large-scale action can only be achieved by a powerful alliance of scientists, technology providers, technology users, language communities, research supporters, and policy makers.

    To this end, a new initiative has set out to forge a Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance: META. Starting point is the Network of Excellence META-NET, a federation of thirteen leading R&D centers in ten European countries, dedicated to

    • Building a Community with a shared vision and strategic research agenda
    • Building an Open Resource Infrastructure
    • Building bridges to neighbouring technology fields.

    Many other first class centers have expressed interest in joining so that the network will keep growing and eventually cover all countries and languages of the EU. At the same time, industry, language professionals, organisational language technology users and public administrations will be mobilized. The first concrete steps toward the needed joint action are a survey of support and technologies for 23 European languages, the development of a shared vision and the drafting of a strategic research agenda.

    Funding for the core network comes from the European Union through the grant Technologies for Multilingual Europe (T4ME).

    www.meta-net.eu
    [email protected]

    LT World will support META by serving as the knowledge and information center of the Alliance.

     



    yocoy releases "i-You" apps, bi-directional communication assistants in time for Expo 2010 Shanghai, in Apple App Store.
    Facebook extends social network with Open Graph.
    IBM and Lionbridge to partner for Instant Translation Technology.
    Nuance introduces Speak & See Accessibility Suite with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
    New European Project to Boost Multilingual Internet Use.
    $8mio MURI grant to investigate unified Theories of Language and Cognition.
    SDL Brand consolidation recognizes significant extension towards Content Technologie and eCommerce.
    Thomson Reuters Checkpoint platform gets natural language search feature.
    OpenAmplify injects Semantics into Keyword Targeting Systems with PinPoint.
    smartRealm launched first Semantic Web-based Social Network Analysis API in Beta.
    Ontotext announced strategic partnership with GATE (University of Sheffield) and Matrixware Information Services.
    Cognition’s Semantic technology contributes to Microsoft’s Bing.
    IBM to patent Semantic Web Tag Clouds.
    Nuance rolls out Mobile Apps and NLP.
    Using Natural Speech instead of DTMF made Telefonica go WOW!
    DARPA launches RATS program for advanced speech-recognition algorithms in noisy conditions.

    A new crop of startups aims to bring artificial intelligence to the masses.

    Other News

    Commission to boost research and innovation by making it easier to apply for and manage EU grants.
    John Wilkins about Science Commons, and Generativity in Science.
    Europe 2020: Commission proposes new economic strategy in Europe.
    New York Times appoints staff for Paid Web model.
    Volunteers log off, as Wikipedia ages.


    ICT Policy Support Programme call open for submission (CIP ICT-PSP)

    A call for proposals has been launched under the 2010 Work Programme of the Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (2007 to 2013). Theme 6 of the call is focused towards the Multilingual Web, for which there are two relevant lines of actions:

    6.1: Open Linguistic Infrastructure

    • provide reusable building blocks

      6.2: Multilingual Online Service

      • demonstrate potential & impact

       

      More information to be found here:

      http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/...

       

      Deadline: June 1st, 2010


      What Else . . .

       

      Talking RoBo
      to teach new languages


      img src=chipchic.com

      Learning a language is something a lot of us want to get around to doing, but software like Rosetta Stone and regular old books are boring to use. Instead, how about having a robot teach you a new language?

      Talking Robo is a personal robot that can teach you to speak a new language, and it will even speak to you like a native speaker. This little bot features speech recognition and it understands natural language when you speak to it. It will also suggest what topics to talk about for practicing. On top of that, Talking Robo also features face recognition so that when the robot converses with a user, it will recognize the user’s face and be able to understand the user’s profile in order to converse with the user more appropriately.

      For more: http://www.chipchick.com/

       


      The Blind Taste Test

      Do you recognize your favorite Search Engine blindly?


      img src=delicategeniousblog