Europe is a multilingual society, in which dozens of languages are spoken. The only option to enable and to benefit from multilingualism is through Language Technologies (LT), i.e., Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies. We describe the European Language Grid (ELG), which is targeted to evolve into the primary platform and marketplace for LT in Europe by providing one umbrella platform for the European LT landscape, including research and industry, enabling all stakeholders to upload, share and distribute their services, products and resources. At the end of our EU project, which will establish a legal entity in 2022, the ELG will provide access to approx. 1300 services for all European languages as well as thousands of data sets.

We describe the MAPA project, funded under the Connecting Europe Facility programme, whose goal is the development of an open-source de-identification toolkit for all official European Union languages. It will be developed since January 2020 until December 2021.

We describe the European Language Resource Infrastructure (ELRI), a decentralised network to help collect, prepare and share language resources. The infrastructure was developed within a project co-funded by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, and has been deployed in the four Member States participating in the project, namely France, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. ELRI provides sustainable and flexible means to collect and share language resources via National Relay Stations, to which members of public institutions can freely subscribe. The infrastructure includes fully automated data processing engines to facilitate the preparation, sharing and wider reuse of useful language resources that can help optimise human and automated translation services in the European Union.

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 and the European LT Council for outreach and coordination purposes.

The current scientific and technological landscape is characterised by the increasing availability of data resources and processing tools and services. In this setting, metadata have emerged as a key factor facilitating management, sharing and usage of such digital assets. In this paper we present ELG-SHARE, a rich metadata schema catering for the description of Language Resources and Technologies (processing and generation services and tools, models, corpora, term lists, etc.), as well as related entities (e.g., organizations, projects, supporting documents, etc.). The schema powers the European Language Grid platform that aims to be the primary hub and marketplace for industry-relevant Language Technology in Europe. ELG-SHARE has been based on various metadata schemas, vocabularies, and ontologies, as well as related recommendations and guidelines.

There are several MT metrics used to evaluate translation into Spanish, although most of them use partial or little linguistic information. In this paper we present the multilingual capability of VERTa, an automatic MT metric that combines linguistic information at lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic level. In the experiments conducted we aim at identifying those linguistic features that prove the most effective to evaluate adequacy in Spanish segments. This linguistic information is tested both as independent modules (to observe what each type of feature provides) and in a combinatory fastion (where different kinds of information interact with each other). This allows us to extract the optimal combination. In addition we compare these linguistic features to those used in previous versions of VERTa aimed at evaluating adequacy for English segments. Finally, experiments show that VERTa can be easily adapted to other languages than English and that its collaborative approach correlates better with human judgements on adequacy than other well-known metrics.

This paper emphasises on ELRA’s contribution to the HLT field thanks to the consolidation of its services since LREC 2012. Among the most recent contributions is the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), with the creation and exploitation of an associated web portal to enable the procurement of unique identifiers for Language Resources. Interoperability, consolidation and synchronization remain also a strong focus in ELRA’s cataloguing work, in particular with ELRA’s involvement in the META-SHARE project, whose platform is to become ELRA’s next instrument of sharing LRs. Since last LREC, ELRA has continued its action to offer free LRs to the research community. Cooperation is another watchword within ELRA’s activities on multiple aspects: 1) at the legal level, ELRA is supporting the EC in identifying the gaps to be fulfilled to reach harmonized copyright regulations for the HLT community in Europe; 2) at the production level, ELRA is participating in several international projects, in the field of LR production and evaluation of technologies; 3) at the communication level, ELRA has organised the NLP12 meeting with the aim of boosting co-operation and strengthening the bridges between various communities.

This paper aims at giving an overview of ELRA’s recent activities. The first part elaborates on ELRA’s means of boosting the sharing Language Resources (LRs) within the HLT community through its catalogues, LRE-Map initiative, as well as its work towards the integration of its LRs within the META-SHARE open infrastructure. The second part shows how ELRA helps in the development and evaluation of HLT, in particular through its numerous participations to collaborative projects for the production of resources and platforms to facilitate their production and exploitation. A third part focuses on ELRA’s work for clearing IPR issues in a HLT-oriented context, one of its latest initiative being its involvement in a Fair Research Act proposal to promote the easy access to LRs to the widest community. Finally, the last part elaborates on recent actions for disseminating information and promoting cooperation in the field, e.g. an the Language Library being launched at LREC2012 and the creation of an International Standard LR Number, a LR unique identifier to enable the accurate identification of LRs. Among the other messages ELRA will be conveying the attendees are the announcement of a set of freely available resources, the establishment of a LR and Evaluation forum, etc.

In the last decades, a wide range of automatic metrics that use linguistic knowledge has been developed. Some of them are based on lexical information, such as METEOR; others rely on the use of syntax, either using constituent or dependency analysis; and others use semantic information, such as Named Entities and semantic roles. All these metrics work at a specific linguistic level, but some researchers have tried to combine linguistic information, either by combining several metrics following a machine-learning approach or focusing on the combination of a wide variety of metrics in a simple and straightforward way. However, little research has been conducted on how to combine linguistic features from a linguistic point of view. In this paper we present VERTa, a metric which aims at using and combining a wide variety of linguistic features at lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic level. We provide a description of the metric and report some preliminary experiments which will help us to discuss the use and combination of certain linguistic features in order to improve the metric performance

This paper describes the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), a new identification schema for Language Resources where a Language Resource is provided with a unique and universal name using a standardized nomenclature. This will ensure that Language Resources be identified, accessed and disseminated in a unique manner, thus allowing them to be recognized with proper references in all activities concerning Human Language Technologies as well as in all documents and scientific papers. This would allow, for instance, the formal identification of potentially repeated resources across different repositories, the formal referencing of language resources and their correct use when different versions are processed by tools.

This paper elaborates on a sustainability model for Language Resources, both at a descriptive and analytical level. The first part, devoted to the descriptive model, elaborates on the definition of this concept both from a general point of view and from the Human Language Technology and Language Resources perspective. The paper also intends to list an exhaustive number of factors that have an impact on this sustainability. These factors will be clustered into Pillars so as ease understanding as well as the prediction of LR sustainability itself. Rather than simply identifying a set of LRs that have been in use for a while and that one can consider as sustainable, the paper aims at first clarifying and (re)defining the concept of sustainability by also connecting it to other domains. Then it also presents a detailed decomposition of all dimensions of Language Resource features that can contribute and/or have an impact on such sustainability. Such analysis will also help anticipate and forecast sustainability for a LR before taking any decisions concerning design and production.

For some years now, web services have been employed in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for a number of uses and within a number of sub-areas. Web services allow users to gain access to distant applications without having the need to install them on their local machines. A large paradigm of advantages can be obtained from a practical and development point of view. However, the legal aspects behind this sharing should not be neglected and should be openly discussed so as to understand the implications behind such data exchanges and tool uses. In the framework of PANACEA, this paper highlights the different points involved and describes the work done in order to handle all the legal aspects behind those points.

This paper presents a metadata model for the description of language resources proposed in the framework of the META-SHARE infrastructure, aiming to cover both datasets and tools/technologies used for their processing. It places the model in the overall framework of metadata models, describes the basic principles and features of the model, elaborates on the distinction between minimal and maximal versions thereof, briefly presents the integrated environment supporting the LRs description and search and retrieval processes and concludes with work to be done in the future for the improvement of the model.

Machine translation evaluation campaigns require the production of reference corpora to automatically measure system output. This paper describes recent efforts to create such data with the objective of measuring the quality of the systems participating in the Quaero evaluations. In particular, we focus on the protocols behind such production as well as all the issues raised by the complexity of the transcription data handled.

15 years have gone by and ELRA continues embracing the needs of the HLT community to design its services and to implement them through its operational body, ELDA. The needs of the community have become much more ambitious...Larger language resources (LR), better quality ones (how do we reach a compromise between price ― maybe free ― and quality?), more annotations, at different levels and for different modalities...easy access to these LRs and solved IPR issues, appropriate and adaptable licensing schemas...large activity in HLT evaluation, both in terms of setting up the evaluation and in helping produce all necessary data, protocols, specifications as well as conducting the whole process...producing the LRs researchers and developers need, LRs for a wide variety of activities and technologies...for development, for training, for evaluation...Disseminating all knowledge in the field, whether generated at ELRA or elsewhere...keeping the community up to date with what goes on regularly (LREC conferences, LangTech, Newsletters, HLT Evaluation Portal, etc.). Needless to say, part of ELRA’s evolution implies facing and anticipating the realities of the new Internet and data exchange era and remaining a LR backbone...looking into new models of LR data centres and platforms, LR access and exchange via web services, new models for infrastructures and repositories with even higher collaboration to make it happen. ELRA/ELDA participate in a number of international projects focused on this new production and sharing schema that will be detailed in the current paper.

This paper describes the latest developments in ELRA’s services within the field of Language Resources (LR). These developments focus on 4 main groups of activities: the identification and distribution of Language Resources; the production of LRs; the evaluation of Human Language Technology (HLT), and the dissemination of information in the field. ELRA’s initial work on the distribution of language resources has evolved throughout the years, currently covering a much wider range of activities that have been considered crucial for the current needs of the R&D community and the “good health” of the LR world. Regarding distribution, considerable work has been done on a broader identification, which does not only consider resources to be immediately negotiated for distribution but which aims to inform on all available resources. This has been the seed for the Universal Catalogue. Furthermore, a Catalogue of LRs with favourable conditions for R&D has also been created. Moreover, the different activities in what regards identification on demand, production within different frameworks, evaluation of language technologies and participation in evaluation campaigns, as well as our very specific focus on information dissemination are described in detail in this paper.

The project described in this paper is funded by the French Ministry of Research. It aims at providing producers of Language Resources, and HLT players in general, with a guide which offers technical, legal and strategic recommendations/guidelines for the reuse of their Language Resources. The guide is dedicated in particular to academic laboratories which produce Language Resources and may benefit from further advice to start development, but also to any HLT player who wishes to follow the best practices in this field. The guidelines focus on different steps of a Language Resource’s life, i.e. specifications, production, validation, distribution, and maintenance. This paper gives a brief overview of the guide, and describes a) technical formats, standards and best practices which correspond to the current state of the art, for different types of resources, whether written or spoken, at different steps of the production line, b) legal issues and models/templates which can be used for the dissemination of Language Resources as widely as possible, c) strategic issues, by offering a dissemination plan which takes into account all types of constraints faced by HLT community players.

This paper describes the evaluation of the FAME interlingua-based speech-to-speech translation system for Catalan, English and Spanish. This system is an extension of the already existing NESPOLE! that translates between English, French, German and Italian. This article begins with a brief introduction followed by a description of the system architecture and the components of the translation module including the Speech Recognizer, the analysis chain, the generation chain and the Speech Synthesizer. Then we explain the interlingua formalism used, called Interchange Format (IF). We show the results obtained from the evaluation of the system and we describe the three types of evaluation done. We also compare the results of our system with those obtained by a stochastic translator which has been independently developed over the course of the FAME project. Finally, we conclude with future work.

In this paper we describe the FAME interlingual speech-to- speech translation System for Spanish, Catalan and English which is intended to assist users in the reservation of a hotel room when calling or visiting abroad. The System has been developed as an extension of the existing NESPOLE! translation system [4] which translates between English, German, Italian and French. After a brief introduction we describe the Spanish and Catalan System components including speech recognition, transcription to IF mapping, IF to text generation and speech synthesis. We also present a task-oriented evaluation method used to inform about system development and some preliminary results.