5th SwissText & 16th KONVENS
Joint Conference 2020

1st Regional ELG Workshop: Switzerland, Austria, Germany


In our globalised world language barriers affect cross-lingual communication and the free flow of knowledge and thought. Language Technologies, especially multilingual technologies, can help overcome these omnipresent and ubiquitous language barriers, significantly improving trade, administration, politics, communication and cross-cultural understanding. Our focus with regard to establishing technology-enabled multilingualism is Europe with its 24 official EU Member State languages, 60 additional unofficial or minority languages as well as languages of immigrants and important trade partners.

This workshop is organised under the umbrella of the EU-funded project European Language Grid (2019-2021). The project develops a scalable cloud platform, providing, in an easy-to-integrate way, access to commercial and non-commercial Language Technology services and data sets for all European languages, including hundreds of running tools and services as well as thousands of data sets and resources. ELG aims at listing all relevant stakeholders, from technology development to research centres, from small and medium-sized companies to large enterprises. Stakeholders will be able to register themselves in the ELG catalogue (the “Yellow Pages of European Language Technology”).

ELG is committed to community building and is also coordinating and collaborating with various larger initiatives on the European level. The European Language Grid has a strong and broad network of 32 National Competence Centres (NCCs), which act as local and national bridges to the ELG consortium and the European Language Grid cloud platform.

This workshop is organised in cooperation with the the ELG National Competence Centres in Austria (Dagmar Gromann, University of Vienna), Switzerland (Hervé Bourlard, Idiap Research Institute) and Germany (Georg Rehm, DFKI).

This full-day workshop will touch upon various topics, including:

  • Technological Multilingualism in Europe: current state of play
  • Overview of the European Language Grid project and platform
  • Demo of the first release of the ELG cloud platform
  • Open Call for Pilot Projects: information for interested parties (criteria and funding)
  • Mini tutorial: how to integrate services and data sets into the ELG platform
  • Best practices from research and industry users of ELG
  • Panel discussion with various stakeholders

For more information, please visit.