The first LTO Dialogue Workshop entitled "Language Resources - Foundations of the Multilingual Digital Single Market" took place on 25 June 2015 in Brussels, on the occasion of the LT-Innovate Summit.
High-level keynote speakers set the scene in the morning plenary, followed by the EC's CEF.AT presentation and discussion:
From left: Paul Rübig, MEP with M. Mazura, EMF; EC Panel: K. Rossi, M. Nagy-Rothengass, R. Madelin, EC, DG CONNECT J. Hummel, ESTeam/LT-Innvoate; Robert Madelin, Director-General DG CONNECT
Workshop Summary
In three sessions, representatives from industry, research and public administrations discussed the demand and supply of language resources, their availability and accessibility, followed by a third sessoin on how to reconcile both and close the gap of missing language resources. Very early in the discussion, it became apparent that the purpose of the use of LR is paramount when defining usability. While existing repositories like META-SHARE, ELRA or CLARIN VLE did a remarkable work in compiling LRs, their usability differs depending on the user. Industry users often prefer their networks combined with clients' resources. New sources like Wikipedia translate may be future sources based on crowd-sourcing. Opus or Babelnet are other open access LRs, like the Acquis Communautaire of the EU.
Main challenges are:
- Costs (to create LR) - price (what can be paid by users) - maintenance (keep them relevant and updated) = quality issue
- Languages: LR should reach out to users - not necessarily the official languages of the EU but regional languages, immigrant languages or main economic partners' languages
- New concepts like "sharing is caring" or "a market place for favours" need to be investigated as potentially new sources for LR
- Scaling and human validation remain challenges
- Accessibility: where to find what I need is a challenge for users
- An often unsolved problem is copyright and ownership!
Presentations:
PANEL 1: Demand side
Miguel García, Zabala - Introduction, Moderator
Bente Maegaard, CLARIN ERIC
Aleksandra Wesolowska, EC, DG CNECT
Gilles Montier, SYSTRAN
Joachim van den Bogaert, CrossLang
Gert van Assche, Datamundi
Serge Gladkoff, Logrus
PANEL 2: Supply Side
Andrew Joscelyn, LT-Innovate, Moderator
Spyridon Pilos, EC, DGT
Steven Krauwer, CLARIN ERIC
Khalid Choukri, ELDA/ELRA
Nuria Bel, UPF
Georg Rehm, DFKI/META-NET
PANEL 3: Matching Supply and Demand
Margaretha Mazura, EMF, Moderator
Andrzej Zydron, XTM
Asun Gómez-Pérez (presented by D. Lewis)
David Lewis, CNGL, Trinity College
Ioannis Iacovidis, Interverbum
Blanca Rodríguez, Zabala
Andrejs Vasiljevs, Tilde
Bente Maegaard, CLARIN ERIC, kicks-off the first session; LTO workshop view
Thanks to Torben Dahl Jensen for covering the LTO Dialogue Workshop on Twitter!
Read our Blog on the key political messages of the event!
For a full story, look up our Storify!
Many more photos of the LTi Summit are available on Flickr!
