Publikation
Multilingual Europe: A challenge for language tech
Georg Rehm; Hans Uszkoreit
In: MultiLingual, Vol. 22, No. 3, Pages 51-52, MultiLingual Computing, 4/2011.
Zusammenfassung
Speaking one’s mother tongue, be it Latvian, Hungarian, or Portuguese, must not become a social or economic disadvantage in the networked European information society of the 21st century. Language Technology has the potential to become the key solution to this crucial challenge if it is robust, cost-effective and available for all European languages and to all European citizens. However, in order to achieve these goals, the pace of research and development has to be accelerated by means of a major, dedicated push. A push with the magnitude needed can only be put into motion through a joint action of all stakeholder groups involved such as, among others, researchers, user and provider industries, technology integrators, language communities, politicians and society in general. To this end, META-NET – a European Network of Excellence that consists of 44 Language Technology research centres based in 31 countries – is building META, the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance.