The document summarizes a presentation on human language technologies in a multilingual Europe. Some key points: - There are 24 official EU languages and many regional/minority languages that have equal status but most are under-supported by language technologies and face digital extinction. - The META-NET alliance coordinates language technology research across Europe but the field remains fragmented. There is a need for high-quality, deployable language technologies to support applications like translation, conversational interfaces, and a multilingual digital single market. - A proposed "Multilingual Value Programme" would help enable the multilingual digital single market through technologies for translating, analyzing, processing and curating natural language content. - A long-term

1. Georg Rehm
georg.rehm@dfki.de
DFKI GmbH, Language Technology Lab – Berlin, Germany
META-NET, General Secretary
Human Language Technologies
in a Multilingual Europe

2. Outline
• Multilingual Europe
• Analysis I: Technology Support for Europe’s Languages
• Analysis II: Status and Current Developments
• Example: LT for the Digital Single Market
• Missions and Opportunities
• Towards the Human Language Project
2EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

3. • Multilingualism is at the very heart of the European idea.
• 24 EU languages – all languages have the same status.
• Dozens of regional and minority languages as well as
languages of immigrants and trade partners.
• Economic challenges:
– If the DSM is not multilingual, there will be 20+ isolated markets!
– Language barriers are market barriers!
• Social and public challenges:
– Empower all citizens to use their mother tongues.
– Provide multilingual digital public services.
– Enable cross-border, cross-lingual, cross-cultural communication.
Towards a European public sphere and e-participation.
– Restore trust in media (fake news debate, filter bubble issue etc.)

4. Analysis I: Technology Support
for Europe’s Languages
4EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

5. q
60 research centres in 34 countries (founded in 2010)
Chair of Executive Board: Jan Hajic (CUNI)
Dep.: J. van Genabith (DFKI), A. Vasiljevs (Tilde)
General Secretary: Georg Rehm (DFKI)
q
Multilingual Europe
Technology Alliance.
826 members in
67 countries
(published in 2013) (31 volumes; published in 2012)
T4ME (META-NET) CESAR METANET4UMETA-NORDMultilingual Europe Technology AllianceNET

6. q Basque
q Bulgarian*
q Catalan
q Croatian*
q Czech*
q Danish*
q Dutch*
q English*
q Estonian*
q Finnish*
q French*
q Galician
q German*
q Greek*
q Hungarian*
q Icelandic
q Irish*
q Italian*
q Latvian*
q Lithuanian*
q Maltese*
q Norwegian
q Polish*
q Portuguese*
q Romanian*
q Serbian
q Slovak*
q Slovene*
q Spanish*
q Swedish*
q Welsh
* Official EU languagehttp://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers

7. MT
English
good
French, Spanish
moderate fragmentary
Catalan, Dutch, German,
Hungarian, Italian, Polish,
Romanian
weak or no support through LT
Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian,
Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish,
Galician, Greek, Icelandic, Irish,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese,
Norwegian, Portuguese, Serbian,
Slovak, Slovene, Swedish, Welsh
excellent
Czech, Dutch,
Finnish, French,
German, Italian,
Portuguese,
Spanish
moderate fragmentary
Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan,
Danish, Estonian, Galician,
Greek, Hungarian, Irish,
Norwegian, Polish, Serbian,
Slovak, Slovene, Swedish
weak or no support through LT
Croatian, Icelandic, Latvian,
Lithuanian, Maltese, Romanian,
Welsh
excellent
English
good
Speech
English
good
Dutch, French,
German, Italian,
Spanish
moderate fragmentary
Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan,
Czech, Danish, Finnish,
Galician, Greek, Hungarian,
Norwegian, Polish,
Portuguese, Romanian,
Slovak, Slovene, Swedish
weak or no support through LT
Croatian, Estonian, Icelandic, Irish,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese,
Serbian, Welsh
excellent
English
good
Czech, Dutch,
French, German,
Hungarian, Italian,
Polish, Spanish,
Swedish
moderate fragmentary
Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan,
Croatian, Danish, Estonian,
Finnish, Galician, Greek,
Norwegian, Portuguese,
Romanian, Serbian, Slovak,
Slovene
Icelandic, Irish, Latvian,
Lithuanian, Maltese, Welsh
weak or no support through LTexcellent
ResourcesTextAnalytics

8. Fragmentary
Weak/none
Moderate
Good
Excellent
Welsh
Maltese
Lithuanian
Latvian
Icelandic
Irish
Croatian
Serbian
Estonian
Slovene
Slovak
Romanian
Norwegian
Greek
Galician
Danish
Bulgarian
Basque
Swedish
Portuguese
Finnish
Catalan
Polish
Hungarian
Czech
Italian
German
Dutch
Spanish
French
English
Levelofsupport
Languages with names in red
have little or no MT support
Source: META-NET White Paper Series: Europe's Languages in the Digital Age. Springer, Heidelberg,
New York, Dordrecht, London, September 2012. Georg Rehm and Hans Uszkoreit (series editors)
Important: even current state of the art
technologies are far from being perfect!
Important: 20+ European languages are
severely under-supported and face the
danger of digital extinction.

9. Excellent
Good
Moderate
Fragmentary
Weak/no
support
LanguageTechnologySupport
MillionsofNativeSpeakers(Worldwide)
Yiddish
Welsh
VlaxRomani
Turkish
Scots
Romany
Occitan
Maltese
Macedonian
Luxembourgish
Lithuanian
Limburgish
Latvian
Icelandic
Friulian
Frisian
Breton
Bosnian
Asturian
Albanian
Irish
Croatian
Serbian
Hebrew
Estonian
Slovene
Slovak
Romanian
Norwegian
Greek
Galician
Danish
Bulgarian
Basque
Swedish
Portuguese
Finnish
Catalan
Polish
Hungarian
Czech
Italian
German
Dutch
Spanish
French
English
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
Source: Georg Rehm, Hans Uszkoreit, Ido Dagan, Vartkes Goetcherian, Mehmet Ugur Dogan, Coskun Mermer, Tamás Váradi, Sabine Kirchmeier-Andersen,
Gerhard Stickel, Meirion Prys Jones, Stefan Oeter, and Sigve Gramstad. An Update and Extension of the META-NET Study “Europe's Languages in the
Digital Age”. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages in the Linked Open Data Era (CCURL 2014),
Reykjavik, Iceland, May 2014.

10. Analysis II: Status and
Current Developments
10EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

11. • Multilingual Europe: our languages enjoy equal status yet digital extinction
of the majority of European languages is a very severe danger.
• Language Technology Research and Innovation in Europe: World class
research, excellent results (examples: Moses, recent NMT results of QT21),
strong SME base, thousands of LSPs; fragmentation; need for coordination.
• Big need for high-quality, high-coverage, precise, robust, deployable
Language Technologies: translation, conversational interfaces, text and
media analytics, personal assistants, multilingual DSM etc.
• Artificial Intelligence: Important breakthroughs and massive investments in
R&D and applications (mostly in US and Asia) – huge opportunity for Europe!
• The European Language Challenge cannot be abandoned or outsourced.
Ø Europe must not make its digital infrastructure dependent
on non-European solutions. This is why the EU is building
GALILEO as an alternative to GPS, GLONASS, Bei Dou.
• Big need for Language Technologies made in Europe for Europe!
Status and Current Developments
11EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)
!

12. Example:
Language Technology for the
Digital Single Market
12EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

13. q Top priority in the European Union.
q Expected to add 400b€ to European GDP
and hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
q Unfortunately, the language topic is not
included in the EC’s Digital Single Market
strategy (published in May 2015).

15. MDSM: Needed Applications
q Crosslingual SME presales communication and aftersales services
q Multilingual websites, product catalogues, product descriptions
q Crosslingual business intelligence (e.g., based on UGC)
q Crosslingual communication for SMEs, public institutions, citizens
q Multilingual (big) data, language and knowledge value chains
q Multilingual knowledge bases and knowledge graphs (and services)
q Multilingual conversational interfaces for connected devices (IoT)
q Crosslingual social media analytics for EU-wide societal issues
q Multilingual text and report generation (knowledge/data to text)
q All services must be domain-adaptable (avoid one size fits all)
q etc.
15EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

16. Multilingual Value Programme
q Multilingual Value Programe
§ Suggested three-year programme
§ Requires modest investment
q “Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single
Market through technologies for
translating, analysing, processing and
curating natural language content”
q Three components address the main
needs of the Multilingual DSM (MDSM)
and how to put them into practice:
1. Multilingual Application Areas
2. Multilingual Services
3. Research
Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
16EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)
Version 1.0 to be published in 2017

17. Missions and Opportunities
17EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

18. Missions and Opportunities
• Languages & European Society: Enable all European citizens
to communicate and operate in their mother tongues (online & offline).
• Languages & Media: Address – technologically – the massively
increasing social, political and commercial relevance of content and
communication (fake news debate, filter bubble challenge).
• Languages & Market: Realise the Multilingual DSM, including
multilingual content, crosslingual text analytics, multilingual generation.
• Languages & Digital Tech: Future-proof our languages.
• Languages & Devices: Robust, precise, high-quality spoken
language interfaces for billions of connected things – and all languages.
• Excellent opportunity for Europe, European research, European
education, European industry, European innovation, European culture!
• Goal: Move Europe into the pole position in this field!
18EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

19. Towards the
Human Language Project
19EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

20. Multilingual
Europe
through
Technology
Multilingual
Strategy of the
EU: more tech
support for
multilingualism
Language
Technologies
for Europe's
digital public
services
Technologies
for the
Multilingual
Digital Single
Market
Language
Technologies
for Big Data
text analytics
The Human
Language
Project – long-
term R&D&I,
post-H2020
Language
Technologies
R&D&I
(H2020, WP
2018-20)
Multilingual Europe
in January 2017
Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
Open calls and
upcoming service
contracts
Dec. 2016: EC brainstorming
meeting on future LT priorities
in Horizon 2020 and FP9.
Need for a new strategy paper?
Jan. 2017: STOA workshop
and study on LT for Europe
Dec. 2017: LT Session
at BDVA Summit in
Valencia
2017: MDSM SRIA V1.0
Policy change and initiative
towards a European digital
public sphere enabled by MT/LT
DG CONNECT
DGT and
DG CONNECT
DG CONNECT
WP 2018-20 (incl. IoT,
I4.0, assistants,
robots etc.)
Shared programme
between EU and MS Suggested MLV Programme
Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
CEF AT
ELRC

21. Multilingual
Europe
through
Technology
Multilingual
Strategy of the
EU: more tech
support for
multilingualism
Language
Technologies
for Europe's
digital public
services
Technologies
for the
Multilingual
Digital Single
Market
Language
Technologies
for Big Data
text analytics
The Human
Language
Project – long-
term R&D&I,
post-H2020
Language
Technologies
R&D&I
(H2020, WP
2018-20)
Multilingual Europe
in January 2017
Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
Open calls and
upcoming service
contracts
Dec. 2016: EC brainstorming
meeting on future LT priorities
in Horizon 2020 and FP9.
Need for a new strategy paper?
Jan. 2017: STOA workshop
and study on LT for Europe
Dec. 2017: LT Session
at BDVA Summit in
Valencia
2017: MDSM SRIA V1.0
Policy change and initiative
towards a European digital
public sphere enabled by MT/LT
DG CONNECT
DGT and
DG CONNECT
DG CONNECT
WP 2018-20 (incl. IoT,
I4.0, assistants,
robots etc.)
Shared programme
between EU and MS Suggested MLV Programme
Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
CEF AT
ELRC
Observations:
• Current initiatives are too small and unbalanced; they
concentrate on innovation and technology deployment.
• Danger to loose touch with research and novel,
potentially paradigm-shifting developments.
• Difficult to kick-start new, paradigm-shifting research.
• We need a coordinated, concerted and consolidated
push in basic research, applied R&D and innovation!

22. Human Language Project – Interdisciplinary R&D&I Programme
Basic
Research
•Results in new
methods,
approaches
Applied R&D
•Results in novel
technologies
Innovation
•Results in novel
or improved
products or
services
Research Themes – Needs and Gaps (market-driven)
• Computational Linguistics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Language Technology
• Linguistics
• Computer Science
• Cognitive Science
• other related fields
• New, groundbreaking
methods, paradigms,
approaches
• Foster technologies,
products, innovation,
economy
• Foster education
HLP: Umbrella programme
to turbo-charge and to
coordinate all European
R&D&I activities in a
systematic way including
EP, EC, Member States.
22EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

23. Human Language Project
• Goal: Deep Natural Language Understanding.
• Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence plus a fresh
look at Linguistics for the Next Generation of LT!
• All official European and many additional languages
• Broad coverage, high quality, high precision
• Across modalities: text, text types, speech, image, video etc.
• Across platforms: messaging, telephony, social, mobile, IoT etc.
• Across cultures: knowledge, customs, formalities, humour,
emotion, subjectivity, biases, opinions, filter bubble etc.
23EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

24. Human Language Project
• Collaboration and coordination between EC, EP,
Member States and all other stakeholders.
• Mix of funding sources:
– EU projects: Horizon 2020 (WP 2018-2020) + FP9 (2021+)
– National/regional funding sources
• Setup: basic research, applied research, innovation,
commercialisation – tightly intertwined
• Timeframe: 10 years
• Policy change towards “LT-enabled multilingualism”
• Public procurement: EU/EC, MS administrations
should demand certain language technologies
24EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

25. HLP Topics: Key Ingredients for
Future European LT Research
Artificial Intelligence
including cognition, perception, vision,
cross-modal, cross-platform, cross-culture, IoT etc.
Machine Learning
Language Technology
• Extend knowledge bases
• Semantic Web, ontologies,
linked data, interoperability
• More complex models
• Multilingual resources that
are grounded, extensible
• Subjectivity, objectivity,
further novel dimensions
• Web-scale reasoning
• Combine DNNs and
symbolic processing
• ML for knowledge
acquisition and extension
• DNNs embedded into
modular systems including
symbolic knowledge bases
• Make it possible to inspect
and also to optimise DNNs
(beyond end-to-end)
• (Computational) Linguistics
research towards deep
language understanding
• From corpora to DNNs to
annotated data to highly
improved symbolic methods
• Language portability
• Full and Deep Language
Understanding by 2030 –
Human Language Project
Knowledge Technology
25EP STOA Workshop: Language Equality in the Digital Age (10 Jan. 2017)

26. Human
Language
Project
Truly
Multilingual
Europe
European
Economy
(MDSM)
Attractive
jobs for
high
potentials
Education
and young
researchers
Massive
boost for
research
Foster
innovation
and new
companies
26

27. Thank you!
Georg Rehm
georg.rehm@dfki.de
Human
Language
Project
Truly
Multilingual
Europe
European
Economy
(MDSM)
Attractive
jobs for
high
potentials
Education
and young
researchers
Massive
boost for
research
Foster
innovation
and new
companies