The AI4Culture project, funded by the European Commission (2023-2025), developed a platform (https://ai4culture.eu) to educate cultural heritage (CH) professionals in AI technologies. Acting as an online capacity building hub, the platform describes openly labeled data sets and deployable and reusable tools applying AI technologies in tasks relevant to the CH sector. It also offers tutorials for tools and recipes for the combination of tools. In addition, the platform allows users to contribute their own resources. The resources described by project partners involve applications for optical or handwritten character recognition (OCR, HTR), generation and validation of subtitles, machine translation, image analysis, and semantic linking. The partners customized various tools to enhance the usability of interfaces and components. Here, we zoom in on the use case of correcting OCR/HTR output using various means (such as an unstructured manual transcription) to facilitate multilingual accessibility and create structured ground truth (text lines with image coordinates).

The CEFAT4Cities project aims at creating a multilingual semantic interoperability layer for Smart Cities that allows users from all EU member States to interact with public services in their own language. The CEFAT4Cities processing pipeline transforms natural-language administrative procedures into machine-readable data using various multilingual Natural Language Processing techniques, such as semantic networks and machine translation, thus allowing for the development of more sophisticated and more user-friendly public services applications.

The OCCAM project (Optical Character recognition, ClassificAtion & Machine Translation) aims at integrating the CEF (Connecting Europe Facility) Automated Translation service with image classification, Translation Memories (TMs), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Machine Translation (MT). It will support the automated translation of scanned business documents (a document format that, currently, cannot be processed by the CEF eTranslation service) and will also lead to a tool useful for the Digital Humanities domain.

The CEFAT4Cities project (2020-2022) will create a “Smart Cities natural language context” (a software layer that facilitates the conversion of natural-language administrative procedures, into machine-readable data sets) on top of the existing ISA2 interoperability layer for public services. Integration with the FIWARE/ORION “Smart City” Context Broker, will make existing, paper-based, public services discoverable through “Smart City” frameworks, thus allowing for the development of more sophisticated and more user-friendly public services applications. An automated translation component will be included, to provide a solution that can be used by all EU Member States. As a result, the project will allow EU citizens and businesses to interact with public services on the city, national, regional and EU level, in their own language.