Language Equality In The Digital Age

The EU is a unique endeavour involving more than 500 million citizens sharing about 80 different languages, and while multilingualism is a key feature, it is also one of the most substantial challenges for the creation of a truly integrated EU. Language barriers have a profound effect on cross-border public services, on fostering a common European identity, on workers' mobility, and on cross-border e-commerce and trade, in the context of a Digital Single Market. The emergence of new technological approaches, based on increased computational power and access to sizeable amounts of data, are making Human Language Technologies (HLT) a real solution to overcoming language barriers. However, several challenges, such as market fragmentation and unsubstantial and uncoordinated funding strategies, are hindering the European HLT community, including research and industry.

In the digital era, language barriers represent a major challenge preventing European citizens and businesses from fully benefiting from a truly integrated Europe. These barriers particularly affect the less educated and older population, as well as speakers of smaller and minority languages, thus creating a notable language divide. Language barriers have a profound effect on (1) cross-border public services, (2) fostering a common European identity, (3) workers' mobility, and (4) cross-border e-commerce and trade, in the context of a Digital Single Market. The emergence of new technological approaches such as deep-learning neural networks, based on increased computational power and access to sizeable amounts of data, are making Human Language Technologies (HLT) a real solution to overcoming language barriers. However, several factors, such as market fragmentation, uncoordinated research and insufficient funding, are hindering the European HLT industry, while putting underresourced languages in danger of digital extinction. Moreover, language technologies are not properly represented in the agenda of European policy-makers, although they are likely to be crucial for the construction of a fair and truly integrated European Union. Based on the analysis of the current state of affairs, we argue for setting up a multidisciplinary large-scale coordinated initiative, the European Human Language Project (HLP). Within the HLP, eleven policies are proposed and assessed. These policies are grouped into: institutional policies, research policies, industry policies, market policies, and public service policies.

This open access book presents a comprehensive collection of the European Language Equality (ELE) project’s results, its strategic agenda and roadmap with key recommendations to the European Union on how to achieve digital language equality in Europe by 2030. The fabric of the EU linguistic landscape comprises 24 official languages and over 60 regional and minority languages. However, language barriers still hamper communication and the free flow of information. Multilingualism is a key cultural cornerstone of Europe, signifying what it means to be and to feel European. Various studies and resolutions have found a striking imbalance in the support of Europe’s languages through technologies, issuing a call to action. Following an introduction, the book is divided into two parts. The first part describes the state of the art of language technology and language-centric AI and the definition and metrics developed to measure digital language equality. It also presents the status quo in 2022/2023, i.e., the current level of technology support for over 30 European languages. The second part describes plans and recommendations on how to bring about digital language equality in Europe by 2030. It includes chapters on the setup and results of the community consultation process, four technical deep dives, an overview of existing strategic documents and an abridged version of the strategic agenda and roadmap. The recommendations have been prepared jointly with the European community in the fields of language technology, natural language processing, and language-centric AI, as well as with representatives of relevant initiatives and associations, language communities and regional and minority language groups. Ensuring appropriate technology support for all European languages will not only create jobs, growth and opportunities in the digital single market. Overcoming language barriers in the digital environment is also essential for an inclusive society and for providing unity in diversity for many years to come.

Against the backdrop of social media and internet use and their impact on communication, those working with minority (or autochthonous) heritage languages, including teachers, language activists and planners and researchers, are reassessing the media, language policy and teaching practices which they had previously applied to stem the tide of language shift towards majority languages. The languages examined in this book are still spoken by a considerable number of speakers and enjoy varying and varied forms of institutional, legal, financial and ideological support. While their overall numbers of speakers are declining, their importance for identity construction and commodification processes continues to increase. This book addresses issues including the potential for a shift from a focus on oral to written practices; the rise of new communities of practice and communicative domains; and the need for resulting shifts in language policy and teaching methods.

The role of technology in the learning process can offer significant contributions to help meet the increasing needs of students. In the field of language acquisition, new possibilities for instructional methods have emerged from the integration of such innovations. The Handbook of Research on Foreign Language Education in the Digital Age presents a comprehensive examination of emerging technological tools being utilized within second language learning environments. Highlighting theoretical frameworks, multidisciplinary perspectives, and technical trends, this book is a crucial reference source for professionals, curriculum designers, researchers, and upper-level students interested in the benefits of technology-assisted language acquisition.

This timely Research Handbook provides a multidisciplinary overview of research on ethno-cultural minority issues at the supranational level of the EU. It delivers a state-of-the-art review of the EU’s approaches to development and institutional implementation of minority policies from the Treaty of Rome until today.

Human language technology is the study of the methods by which computer programs or electronic devices can analyze, produce, modify or respond to human texts and speech. It consists of natural language processing and computational linguistics on the one hand, and speech technology on the other. This book presents the proceedings of the 9th International Conference, Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2020), organised in Kaunas, Lithuania on 22 and 23 September 2020. This biennial conference offers researchers a platform to share knowledge on recent advances in human language processing for the Baltic languages, as well as promoting interdisciplinary and international cooperation in human language-technology research within and beyond the Baltic States. In addition to the traditional topics of natural language processing and language technologies, this year’s conference featured a special session on resource and tool development for teaching and learning the less resourced Baltic languages. This year, 42 submissions were received, each of which was evaluated by two reviewers, resulting in a total of 34 papers being accepted for presentation and publication. The book is divided into four sections: speech and text analysis (9 papers); machine translation and natural understanding (6 papers); tools and resources (14 papers); and language learning resources (5 papers). Providing a fascinating overview of current research in the field from a primarily Baltic perspective, the book will be of interest to all those whose work involves human language technology.

This open access book provides an in-depth description of the EU project European Language Grid (ELG). Its motivation lies in the fact that Europe is a multilingual society with 24 official European Union Member State languages and dozens of additional languages including regional and minority languages. The only meaningful way to enable multilingualism and to benefit from this rich linguistic heritage is through Language Technologies (LT) including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Speech Technologies and language-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The European Language Grid provides a single umbrella platform for the European LT community, including research and industry, effectively functioning as a virtual home, marketplace, showroom, and deployment centre for all services, tools, resources, products and organisations active in the field. Today the ELG cloud platform already offers access to more than 13,000 language processing tools and language resources. It enables all stakeholders to deposit, upload and deploy their technologies and datasets. The platform also supports the long-term objective of establishing digital language equality in Europe by 2030 – to create a situation in which all European languages enjoy equal technological support. This is the very first book dedicated to Language Technology and NLP platforms. Cloud technology has only recently matured enough to make the development of a platform like ELG feasible on a larger scale. The book comprehensively describes the results of the ELG project. Following an introduction, the content is divided into four main parts: (I) ELG Cloud Platform; (II) ELG Inventory of Technologies and Resources; (III) ELG Community and Initiative; and (IV) ELG Open Calls and Pilot Projects.

This book explores the interaction between three key aspects of everyday life--language, writing, and mobility --with particular focus on their effects on language contact. While the book adopts an established view of language and society that is in keeping with the sociolinguistic paradigm developed in recent decades, it differs from earlier studies in that it assigns writing a central position. Sociolinguistics has long concentrated primarily on speech, but Florian Coulmas shows in this volume that the social importance of writing should not be disregarded: it is the most consequential technology ever invented; it suggests stability; and it defines borders. Linguistic studies have often emphasized that writing is external to language, but the discipline nevertheless owes its analytic categories to writing. Finally, the digital revolution has fundamentally changed communication patterns, transforming the social functions of writing and consequently also of language.

This book is about innovation, reflection and inclusion. Cultural innovation is something real that tops up social and technological innovation by providing the reflective society with spaces of exchange in which citizens engage in the process of sharing their experiences while appropriating common goods content. We are talking of public spaces such as universities, academies, libraries, museums, science-centres, but also of any place in which co-creation activities may occur. The argument starts with the need for new narratives in the history of philosophy, which can be established through co-creation, the motor of cultural innovation. The result is redefining the history of philosophy in terms of a dialogical civilization by ensuring continuous translations, individual processes of reflection and collective processes of inclusion. Readers will grasp the effectiveness of the history of philosophy in societies that are inclusive, innovative and reflective.