public report no. 2...technologies for the multilingual european information society public report...

This document is part of the Network of Excellence “Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance (META-NET)”, co-funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission through the T4ME grant agreement no.: 249119.

A Network of Excellence forging the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

Public Report No. 2

Period covered: 2011

Authors: Georg Rehm, John Judge, Jan Hajic

Dissemination Level: Public

Date: December 15, 2011

Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society Public Report No. 2

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Grant agreement no. 249119 Project acronym T4ME Net (META-NET) Project full title Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society Funding scheme Network of Excellence Coordinator Prof. Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI) Start date, duration 1 February 2010, 36 months Distribution Public Contractual date of delivery 15 November 2011 Actual date of delivery 15 December 2011 Deliverable number n.a. Deliverable title Public Progress Report No. 2 Type Report Status and version Final Number of pages 15 Contributing partners all WP/Task Leader DFKI Authors Georg Rehm, John Judge, Jan Hajic EC project officer Hanna Klimek The partners in T4ME are:

Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Germany Barcelona Media (BM), Spain Consiglio Nazionale Ricerche – Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (CNR), Italy Institute for Language and Speech Processing, R.C. “Athena” (ILSP), Greece Charles University in Prague (CUP), Czech Republic Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’Ingénieur (CNRS), France Universiteit Utrecht (UU), Netherlands Aalto University (AALTO), Finland Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH), Germany Jozef Stefan Institute (JSI), Slovenia Evaluations and Language Resources Distribution Agency (ELDA), France

For copies of reports, updates on project activities and other META-NET-related information, contact:

DFKI GmbH META-NET Dr. Georg Rehm [email protected] Alt-Moabit 91c Phone: +49 (30) 23895-1833 10559 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49 (30) 23895-1810

Copies of reports and other material can also be accessed via http://www.meta-net.eu

© 2011, The Individual Authors No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with-out permission from the copyright owner.


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Table of Contents

1 Executive Summary ............................................................................................................... 4 2 Overview ................................................................................................................................ 4 3 Activities ................................................................................................................................ 5

3.1 Machine Translation Research ....................................................................................... 5 3.2 META-SHARE: The Open Resource Exchange Facility ................................................ 6 3.3 Towards a European LT Community and a Strategic Research Agenda ....................... 7

3.3.1 Vision Groups ........................................................................................................... 8 3.3.2 META Technology Council ...................................................................................... 9

3.4 Language White Papers ................................................................................................ 10 3.5 Collaborations ................................................................................................................ 11

4 Dissemination ...................................................................................................................... 11 4.1 Events ............................................................................................................................. 11 4.2 Website and Social Media ............................................................................................ 13

5 The META-NET Network of Excellence ............................................................................. 13 6 Useful Links ........................................................................................................................ 15 7 Contact ................................................................................................................................. 15


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1 Executive Summary META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to building the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society.1 During the first 24 months the project has been developing very successfully. An important part of the project is concerned with building up a coherent and homogeneous Language Technology community in Europe by bringing together representatives from the currently highly fragmented and heterogeneous stakeholder groups (researchers, user indus-tries, provider industries, administrators, politicians, integrators etc.). Significant steps to-wards this goal have been taken through various means such as, for example, by successfully mobilising ca. 70 external members for Vision Groups in the areas “Translation and Locali-sation”, “Media and Information Services” and “Interactive Systems”. Furthermore, META-NET has been engaged in intense dissemination and communication activities right from the beginning of the project. These include presentations at various research and industry events and conferences, as well as outreach activities in various language communities for example producing Language White Papers – according to our estimates we have already reached more than 2,500 language and language technology professionals and informed them about META-NET’s goals. In addition to the wide visibility provided by successful dissemination and mobilisation activities at conferences, META-NET organised its own events such as the ML4HMT Workshop and the EUROLAN Summer School. The main META-NET event in 2011 was META-FORUM 2011 (Jun 27/28, Budapest, Hungary). At META-FORUM more than 300 participants were informed, among others, about the vision building process and the Strategic Research Agenda and they got a look at early editions of the Language White Paper series. The participants provided feedback and their views on the visions and direc-tions presented by the project. Moreover, the open resource exchange facility META-SHARE was demonstrated to the community and public at large in advance of version 1 of the system going live online. META-FORUM 2011 also hosted a large exhibition space where 17 compa-nies from throughout Europe showcased their products and technologies. META-SHARE, the open resource exchange facility which is currently being designed and implemented by META-NET, went live in July of this year for use by partners within the network of excellence. Work started, with regard to the Description of Work, well in advance in order to guarantee a head start. Important results are a working first version of the system and a solid plan for a full public release early in 2012. While the Network of Excellence has a founding consortium that consists of 13 partners in 10 countries, META-NET operates on a European level. This is why, in November 2010, the network was extended to include the partners of three PSP projects, CESAR, METANET4U and META-NORD that have been initiated to support the key goals of META-NET. The three PSP projects started work on February 1, 2011 – exactly one year after the start of META-NET. The extended META-NET network now consists of 54 partners in 33 countries.

2 Overview META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to fostering the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. Language Technologies will enable commu-nication and cooperation across languages, secure users of any language equal access to in-formation and knowledge (especially with regard to the common digital market), build upon and advance functionalities of networked information technology.

1 The project through which META-NET is funded is called T4ME Net (grant agreement no. 249119). While the names T4ME and ORI (Open Resource Infrastructure) are used in T4ME’s Description of Work, following a con-sortium decision at the kick-off meeting, META-NET and META-SHARE are now the main brand names that replace T4ME and ORI.


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A concerted, substantial, continent-wide effort in language tech-nology research and engineering is needed for realising applica-tions that enable automatic translation, multilingual information and knowledge management and content production across all European languages. This effort will also enhance the develop-ment of intuitive language-based interfaces to technology ranging from household electronics, machinery and vehicles to computers and robots. To this end META-NET is building the Multilingual Europe Tech-nology Alliance (META), bringing together researchers, commer-cial technology providers, private and corporate language tech-

nology users, language professionals and other information society stakeholders. META will prepare the necessary ambitious joint effort towards furthering language technologies as a means towards realising the vision of a Europe united as one single digital market and in-formation space. META-NET is supporting these goals by pursuing three lines of action:

1. fostering a dynamic and influential community around a shared vision and strategic research agenda (META-VISION),

2. creating an open distributed facility for the sharing and exchange of resources (META-SHARE),

3. building bridges to relevant neighbouring technology fields.

3 Activities The three major lines of action mentioned above translate into three distinct areas into which META-NET is structured: innovative Machine Translation research that builds bridg-es to neighbouring technology fields (Section 3.1), designing and implementing META-SHARE (Section 3.2) and building a European LT Community and Strategic Research Agen-da (Section 3.3).2

3.1 Machine Translation Research

Activities in this first section of META-NET consist of research work in four work packages. These are concerned with bringing more semantics into Machine Translation, optimising the division of labour in hybrid Machine Translation, exploiting the context for Translation and preparing a base of additional language resources for Machine Translation. In the first two years of META-NET, substantial progress has been achieved in the first two areas. Semantics-based systems took part in evaluation campaigns (competitions) organized by the EuroMatrix+ project, and reported upon at the Workshops on Machine Translation, associated with the main conferences by the Association of Computational Linguistics. Two main methods emerged as novel approaches: using co-reference analysis and using syntactic relations between semantic units (meaningful words). These methods have improved the MT systems translating between English and French, German and Czech. Hybrid systems (com-bining statistical and linguistic approaches) have also achieved progress, and the languages tackled included English, French, German and also Spanish. The preparation of a novel methodology using large quantities of data has started with re-sults expected later in the project.

2 This public report gives a non-exhaustive overview of selected major results of the project.


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Large-scale data resources for MT (i.e., parallel translated text corpora) have been acquired, cleaned and aligned, and processed by basic automatic language analysis tools, such as tag-gers and parsers, to serve as a basis for further MT research. Parts of them have also been carefully (manually) linguistically analyzed (for Czech and English) in order to assess in more detail the contribution of syntax and semantics to MT improvements. All these re-sources will be available through the META-SHARE repository for public use. Participants in the META-NET research network have submitted a proposal to organize a special META-NET workshop on advanced treebanking (which relates not only to the agenda of the semantics-in-MT area, but also to the acquisition and use of novel resources for MT and language research), which has been accepted for the LREC conference in 2012 in Istan-bul. Another workshop on hybrid systems will be organized at ICML 2012. A challenge and a workshop have been organized in 2011 on using machine learning tech-niques for optimising the “division of labour” in hybrid systems. Two more challenges have been prepared to be organized in 2012 and 2013, namely, on combining MT outputs (at ICANN 2012) and a shared task on hybrid systems at NTCIR 10. Numerous publications and speeches have been given at various relevant conferences, such as those organized by ACL and ISCA. Two open schools have been organized in 2010 and 2011 in Barcelona and Prague.

3.2 META-SHARE: The Open Resource Exchange Facility

The very diverse and varied landscape of huge amounts of digital and digitized data collec-tions (publications, multimedia files, datasets, applications, etc.) has drastically transformed the requirements for their archiving, publication, discovery and long-term maintenance. Dig-ital repositories provide the infrastructure for storing, preserving, describing, and making this information publicly available in an open, user-friendly and trusted way. Such reposito-ries represent an evolution of the digital libraries paradigm towards open access, advanced search capabilities and large-scale distributed architectures. META-NET has built META-SHARE, a sustainable network of repositories of language data, tools and web services documented with high-quality metadata, aggregated in central inven-tories allowing for uniform search and access to resources. Data and tools can be both open and with restricted access rights, free and for-a-fee. META-SHARE targets existing but also new and emerging language data, tools and systems required for building and evaluating new technologies, products and services. In this respect, reuse, combination, repurposing and re-engineering of language data and tools play a crucial role. META-SHARE will eventu-ally be an important component of the language technology marketplace for HLT researchers and developers, language professionals (translators, interpreters, content and software local-isation experts, etc.), as well as for industrial players, especially SMEs, catering for the full development cycle of HLT, from research through to innovative products and services. More specifically, META-SHARE is a freely available facility, supported by a large user and developer community, based on distributed networked repositories accessible through com-mon interfaces. Users (consumers, providers or aggregators) will have single sign-on ac-counts and will be able to access everything within the repository. Each language resource will be given a permanent identifier (PID). One of the key features of META-SHARE is metadata harvesting, allowing for discovering and sharing resources across many reposito-ries. META-SHARE will also cater for advanced metadata schemata regarding description, harvesting and discovery of resources. It will be accompanied by a search function, so that users can search and navigate through its resources in the most flexible way possible. META-SHARE will allow the easy integration of new functionalities and services. In order to ensure modularity and robustness, it follows a service-oriented architecture. Moreover, it handles equally effective diverse file types. Finally, META-SHARE provides the ability to compile and produce statistical reports, according to the different user types.


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Figure 1: META-SHARE

META-SHARE was initially demonstrated to the public as a proof of concept at META-FORUM 2010. Since then work has continued and now the system is running and publicly accessible at http://www.meta-share.eu. The initial Version 1 was showcased at META-FORUM 2011 in June and went live shortly afterwards. Each subsequent iteration improves various features and adds new functionality. Currently, before the public release due Febru-ary 2012 META-SHARE consists of 13 repositories and provides information on over 1200 language resources. The key dates in the continuing roll out of META-SHARE are:

• Nov. 2010: V0 (preliminary pre-release demo’ed at META-FORUM 2010) • Apr. 2011: V0.1 (first prototype of metadata editor) • June 2011: V1 prototype (publicly accessible demo at META-FORUM 2011) • July 2011: V1 (basic release) • Nov. 2011: V1.1 • Feb. 2012: V2 public release (open source release with extended functionality) • July 2012: V3 (community release)

3.3 Towards a European LT Community and a Strategic Re-search Agenda

The third area of META-NET is concerned with bringing together the highly fragmented Eu-ropean Language Technology community and with preparing, establishing and successfully implementing a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) with the ultimate goal of overcoming lan-guage boundaries in Europe by means of Language Technology. This SRA is meant to be a long-term instrument. It will cover the period until 2020 and will be an umbrella for both industrial and academic research. The SRA will contain high-level recommendations and suggestions for joint actions to be presented to the European Commission and national as well as regional bodies.


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Specialised focus groups, Vision Groups, are central components within the complex process of collecting input for and preparing the Strategic Research Agenda. These Vision Groups held a series of meetings to generate domain-specific visions and roadmaps in the form of technology forecasts. These include ideas for innovative applications of language technology and scenarios for the future knowledge society. The visions produced have been gathered and presented in the Vision Paper “The Future Multilingual European Information Society” which was presented to the community at META-FORUM 2011. The work of the Vision groups is now being continued by the META Technology Council, which will consolidate the-se visions into the SRA.

3.3.1 Vision Groups

As META-NET strives to bring Europe’s Language Technology industry not only scientifical-ly, but also economically into a leading position, the Vision Groups are primarily composed of distinguished stakeholders from industry and business, supplemented by leading re-searchers from the respective fields. The Vision Groups bring together the different Language Technology communities and in-dustries. At the same time, the produced visions will be used to convey META’s message to policy makers, private and public sponsors and the general public. The groups were assembled in an effort to cluster the relevant and most promising European Language Technology-related industry sectors into reasonably sized working groups. The Vision Groups first met in 2010 beginning a series of brainstorming, discussion and community consultation activities around each Vision Group’s topic. This work continued into 2011 with more meetings of the groups as well as work to consolidate the output of the group meetings. The result of this is a series of reports from each Vision Group outlining their activities and their take on the future of the field. Drawing on both the Vision Group meetings and the reports the Vision Paper “The Future Multilingual European Information Society” was produced.3 The Vision Paper highlights emerging trends in the field and identi-fies key visions for the future as well as outlining the importance of the socio-economic con-text in which LT plays a key role for Europe. The Vision Groups’ work and the Vision paper were presented to the assembled community at META-FORUM 2011 in Budapest and pro-vided a basis for further discussions about the development of the SRA. Fields Technical documentation, consumer information, official bulletins, user interface

localisation, games, services, etc. Stakeholders Software companies, game companies, large users of translation services, transla-

tion companies, localisation industry, etc. Conveners Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI, Germany), Josef van Genabith (DCU/CNGL, Ireland) Members Andrew Bredenkamp (acrolinx), Aljoscha Burchardt (DFKI), David Filip (Moravia

Worldwide), Stefan Geissler (Temis), Josef van Genabith (DCU/CNGL), Daniel Grasmick (Lucy Software), Jan Hajic (Charles University Prague), Martin Kay (Stan-ford University, Universität des Saarlandes), Stefan Kreckwitz (Across Systems), Gudrun Magnusdottir (ESTeam AB), Elisabeth Maier (CLS Communication AG), Jörg Porsiel (VW), Artur Raczynski (European Patent Office), Georg Rehm (DFKI), Johann Roturier (Symantec), Svetlana Sokolova (ProMT), Volker Steinbiss (RWTH Aachen), Lori Thicke (Lexcelera, Translators Without Borders), Gregor Thurmair (LinguaTec), Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI)

Table 1: Vision Group Translation and Localisation

Fields Audiovisual sector, news, digital libraries, portals, search engines, etc. Stakeholders Media industries, web and search engine providers, archives, etc. Conveners Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, Greece), Margaretha Mazura (EMF, Belgium/UK) Members Toni Badia (BM), Nozha Boujemaa (INRIA), Nicoletta Calzolari (CNR), Marin Dimi-

3 The Vision Group reports and the Vision Paper are published online at http://www.meta-net.eu/vision/


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trov (Ontotext), Christoph Dosch (IRT), René van Erk (Wolters Kluwer), Gil Fran-copoulo (LIMSI), Robert Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield), Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead), Marko Grobelnik (JSI), Christopher Kermorvant (A2iA), MariaKout-sombogera (ILSP), Claude de Loupy (Syllabs), Margaretha Mazura (EMF), Alexan-dre Passant (DERI), Stelios Piperidis (ILSP), Georg Rehm (DFKI), Sergi Sagàs (Me-diaPro), Alessandro Tescari (Pervoice), Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI), Philippe Wacker (EMF), Jakub Zavrel (Textkernel)

Table 2: Vision Group Media and Information Services

Fields Mobile assistance, dialogue translation, call centres, etc. Stakeholders Mobile software and service providers, telecom industry, call centres, games indus-

tries, etc. Conveners Joseph Mariani (LIMSI/CNRS, France), Bernardo Magnini (FBK, Italy) Members Axel Buendia (Spir.Ops), Nick Campbell (Trinity College Dublin), Khalid Choukri

(ELDA), Morena Danieli (Loquendo), Gil Francopoulo (Tagmatica, IMMI), Simon Garrett (British Telecom), Martine Garnier-Rizet (Vecsys, IMMI), Edouard Geof-frois (DGA), Joakim Gustafson (KTH), Jan Hajic (Charles University Prague), Paul Heisterkamp (Daimler), Mattias Heldner (KTH), Arjan van Hessen (Telecats, Twen-te University), Timo Honkela (Aalto University), Simon King (University of Edin-burgh), Jimmy Kunzmann (EML), David van Leeuwen (TNO, Radboud University), Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, IMMI), Bernardo Magnini (FBK), Jan Odijk (Utrecht University), Mehmed Ozkan (Bogazici University), Gabor Proszeky (Morphologic), Giuseppe Riccardi (Univ. Trento), David Sadek (Institut Télécom), Ruud Smeulders (RABO Bank), Volker Steinbiss (RWTH, Accipio), Daniel Tapias (Sigma), Claire Waast (EDF), Alex Waibel (CMU, KIT, Jibbigo).

Table 3: Vision Group Interactive Systems

3.3.2 META Technology Council

The objective of the META Technology Council is to take as input the domain-specific visions and ideas for innovative applications and research areas that have been produced by the three Vision Groups and to consolidate these visions into a single convincing strategy which will later on be broken down into roadmaps and a Strategic Research Agenda. Work on the SRA has begun and initial discussions with the community took place at META-FORUM 2011. The tone for these discussions was set by the earlier publication of the Vision Paper “The Future Multilingual European Information Society” and the Vision Group re-ports. The SRA is currently being drafted by members of the Technology Council and is ex-pected to be finalised early in 2012. It will be publicly launched at META-FORUM 2012.

Name Affiliation Role Country

Michaela Bartelt Electronic Arts General Manager for localisation (Europe and Asia)

Germany

Will Burgett Intel Corporation Localisation Program Manager

USA

Mirko Silvestrini European Union of Associations of Translation Companies (EU-ATC)

President Italy

Nicoletta Calzolari Consiglio Nazionale d. Ricerche Director of Research Italy Bill Dolan Microsoft Research Head of NLP USA Josef van Genabith Dublin City University, CNGL Director Ireland Yota Georgakopolou European Captioning Institute Managing Director UK, Greece Gregory Grefenstette Exalead Chief Science Officer France Jan Hajic Charles University Professor Czech Re-

public


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Theo Hoffenberg Softissimo CTO France Thomas Hofmann Google Dir. Engineering Switzerland Keith Jeffrey ERCIM President UK Stefan Kreckwitz Across CTO Germany Claude de Loupy Syllabs CEO France Elisabeth Maier CLS Communication CTO Switzerland Daniel Marcu Language Weaver CTO USA, Ro-

mania Joseph Mariani CNRS-LIMSI, IMMI Director France Jaap van der Meer TAUS Director Netherlands Roger Moore University of Sheffield Professor UK Stelios Piperidis ILSP, Research Centre “Athena” Head of Department Greece Gabor Proszeky Morphologic CEO Hungary Georg Rehm DFKI Senior Consultant Germany C.M. Sperberg-McQueen World Wide Web Consortium Technical Staff USA Daniel Tapias Sigma Technologies CEO Spain Alessandro Tescari Pervoice CEO Italy Hans Uszkoreit DFKI Scientific Director Germany Andrejs Vasiljevs Tilde CEO Latvia Alex Waibel CMU, University of Karlsruhe Professor USA/Germa

ny Johannes Bursch Daimler AG Head of Corporate Lan-

guage Management Germany

László Podhorányi Vodafone Vice Director General Hungary Elie Znaty Vecsys Director France

Table 4: Current composition of the META Technology Council

3.4 Language White Papers

META-NET partners in each country, totalling over 160 authors, have worked to prepare a series of white papers on 30 European languages. Each white paper examines the state of LT support for a language as well as looking at the social, political, and economic circumstances affecting the language itself and LT support thereof. Each white paper follows a common pattern reporting on the situation for each language in the same way. Because of this format the white papers allow us to easily compare and contrast the situation for each language and see areas where various initiatives are having impact as well as see how peculiarities of a lan-guage as well as regional and cultural factors affect the situation. The Language White Papers are written by experts in the field of Language Technology in each region and are accessible texts aimed at journalists, politicians, decision makers and language communities. The white papers are an important tool in META-NET’s work, not just to act as a survey of the current situation for our languages but also to serve as a com-municative device to draw attention to the importance of our languages and Language Tech-nology and to show the potential of the field. META-NET partners have produced Language White Papers for the following languages:

Basque Icelandic Bulgarian Irish

Catalan Italian Croatian Latvian

Czech Lithuanian Danish Maltese Dutch Norwegian

English Polish


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Estonian Portuguese Finnish Romanian French Serbian

Galician Slovak German Slovene

Greek Spanish Hungarian Swedish

Table 5: Languages covered by the Language White Paper Series to date

3.5 Collaborations

In addition to the core funded project groups of the Network, META-NET collaborates with several other EU-funded projects. Discussions and meetings throughout the year have re-sulted in many more EU projects getting behind the META-NET banner and signing formal cooperation agreements. At the time of writing META-NET has cooperation agreements with some twenty other projects representing various related and complimentary areas of R&D. An up-to-date list can be found online at http://www.meta-net.eu/collaborations.

4 Dissemination META-NET is not a typical research project. Instead, an unusually large part of our work is concerned with dedicated dissemination, mobilisation, outreach and awareness raising activ-ities, presenting the challenges Europe is facing with regard to multilingualism, the overall goal of the project and initial results to various different stakeholder groups. The main dissemination instruments are events (including scientific publications), the Virtu-al Information Centre, social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) and traditional materials such as press releases and printed brochures. In the first months of META-NET, a communication and dissemination plan was developed that takes into account these communication instru-ments and the heterogeneous set of stakeholder groups. This plan was further developed this year in light of work done to date and in conjunction with the three PSP projects which joined the network of excellence.

4.1 Events

Events – internal meetings, small workshops and also large, public conferences – play an important role in META-NET. In the reporting period representatives of META-NET partic-ipated in multiple events. In addition, META-NET organised or co-organised several public and also multiple internal events such as workshops and Vision Group meetings. Below we present a selection of events META-NET was involved in during the reporting period and also a few photos. Additional information on META-NET’s public events can be found at http://www.meta-net.eu/events, additional photos are available on the META facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/META.Alliance.

Event City, Country Date

Conference “Language Technology for Multilingual Applications” organized by the European Parliament

Luxembourg Jan. 27

Joint kick-off meeting CESAR, METANET4U, ME-TA-NORD

Luxembourg Feb. 8-10

Opening of German/Austrian W3C Office at DFKI Berlin, Germany Feb. 10 CICling 2011 Tokyo, Japan Feb. 22 Japanese Workshop for Machine Translation Tokyo, Japan Feb. 23 Meeting of Representatives of European Language Copenhagen, Denmark March 08


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Councils TRALOGY Paris, France March 3/4 Vision Group “Interactive Systems” Rotterdam, Netherlands March 28 Vision Group “Media and Information Services” Vienna, Austria April 1 Meeting of the “LT Berlin” working group Berlin, Germany April 4 Vision Group “Translation and Localisation” Prague, Czech Republic April 7/8 Attensity Forum 2011 Berlin, Germany May 6 META Technology Council Meeting Venice May 25 META-FORUM 2011 Budapest June 27/28 Media for All London Jun. 29-July 1 EUROLAN 2011 Summer School Cluj-Napoca, Romania Aug. 28-Sep. 4 RANLP 2011 Hissar, Bulgaria Sep. 12-14 Multilingual Web Workshop Limerick, Ireland Sep. 21/22 ML4HMT Workshop at MT Summit Xiamen, China Sep. 19-23 Workshop Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe at GSCL 2011

Hamburg, Germany Sep. 27

GSCL 2011: “Multilingual Resources and Multilin-gual Applications”

Hamburg, Germany Sep. 28-30

META-NET Network Meeting and General Assembly Berlin, Germany Oct. 21/22 NPLD Assembly Eskilstuna, SE Oct. 25/26 EFNIL Conference London, UK Oct. 26 ML4HMT-11 Workshop Barcelona, Spain Nov. 19

Table 6: A selection of events that META-NET organised or participated in in 2011

Figure 2: The META-NET General Assembly (Oct., Berlin); Joint Kick-Off Meeting of the 3 new META-NET

Partner Projects (Feb., Luxembourg); META-FORUM 2011 and industry expo (June, Budapest)


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4.2 Website and Social Media

Maintaining a strong online presence is important for a project such as META-NET. With so many partners involved and such a large geographical distribution, the website, social media and other online fora are central communication instruments of META-NET. In addition to the website proper (http://www.meta-net.eu), the Virtual Information Centre consists of the internal intranet of the project T4ME and the knowledge portal LT World (http://www.lt-world.org). The website also hosts a blog which is used for publishing relevant news and sto-ries as well as detailed information and relevant documents on the project’s work. The multilingual META-NET website makes available, among others, information on META-SHARE, the members of the Network of Excellence, previous and upcoming events and the vision building process. The website and social media are also useful for gathering infor-mation and receiving feedback through comments and discussion forums.

Figure 3: The META-NET website

5 The META-NET Network of Excellence The founding consortium of META-NET consists of 13 partners, which cover a total of ten countries. From the outset it was planned to extend the network so that all member states of the European Union are represented. This extension process meant that the original 13 part-ners were joined by consortia from three PSP projects, CESAR, METANET4U and META-NORD to enlarge the Network of Excellence. The extended network now consists of 54 members in 33 countries.

Country Member (Affiliation) Contacts

Austria Zentrum für Translationswissenschaft, Universi-tät Wien

Gerhard Budin


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Belgium Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Centre (CLiPS), Uni-versity of Antwerp

Walter Daelemans

Centre for Processing Speech and Images, Uni-versity of Leuven

Dirk van Compernolle

Bulgaria Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Svetla Koeva

Croatia Institute of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Zagreb

Marko Tadic

Cyprus Language Centre, School of Humanities Jack Burston Czech Rep. Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics,

Charles University in Prague Jan Hajic

Denmark Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen

Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Bente Maegaard

Estonia Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu

Tiit Roosmaa

Finland Computational Cognitive Systems Research Group, Aalto University

Timo Honkela

Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki

Kimmo Koskenniemi, Krister Linden

France CNRS, LIMSI Joseph Mariani ELDA Khalid Choukri Germany DFKI Hans Uszkoreit, Georg Rehm RWTH Aachen Hermann Ney Department of Computational Linguistics, Saar-

land University Manfred Pinkal

Greece ILSP, R.C. “Athena” Stelios Piperidis Hungary Research Institute for Linguistics,

Hungarian Academy of Sciences Tamás Váradi

Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Budapest Technical University

Géza Németh, Gábor Olaszy

Iceland School of Humanities, University of Iceland Eirikur Rögnvaldsson Ireland Dublin City University Josef van Genabith Israel Department of Computer Sciences, Bar-Ilan

University Ido Dagan

Italy Consiglio Nazionale Ricerche Nicoletta Calzolari Fondazione Bruno Kessler Bernardo Magnini Latvia Tilde Andrejs Vasiljevs Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science,

University of Latvia Inguna Skadina

Lithuania Institute of the Lithuanian Language Jolanta Zabarskaitė Luxembourg Arax Ltd. Vartkes Goetcherian Malta Department Intelligent Computer Systems, Uni-

versity of Malta Mike Rosner

Netherlands CLCG/Computational Linguistics, University of Groningen

Gertjan van Noord

Universiteit Utrecht Jan Odijk Norway University of Bergen Koenraad De Smedt Dep. of Informatics, Language Technology

Group, University of Oslo Stephan Oepen

Poland Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences

Adam Przepiórkowski, Maciej Ogrodniczuk

University of Lódz Barbara L.-Tomaszczyk, Piotr Pęzik

Department of Computer Linguistics and Artifi-cial Intelligence, Adam Mickiewicz University

Zygmunt Vetulani


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Portugal Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon Antonio Branco Spoken Language Systems Lab, Institute for

Systems Engineering and Computers Isabel Trancoso

Romania Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Romanian Academy of Sciences

Dan Tufis

Faculty of Computer Science, University Alexan-dru Ioan Cuza

Dan Cristea

Serbia Faculty of Mathematics, Belgrade University Dusko Vitas, Cvetana Krstev, Ivan Obradovic

Pupin Institute Sanja Vranes Slovakia Ludovit Stur Institute of Linguistics, Slovak

Academy of Sciences Radovan Garabik

Slovenia Jozef Stefan Institute Marko Grobelnik Spain Barcelona Media Toni Badia Center for Language and Speech Technologies

and Applications, Technical University of Cata-lonia

Asunción Moreno

Institut Universitari de Lingüistica Aplicada, University Pompeu Fabra

Núria Bel

Aholab Signal Processing Laboratory University of the Basque Country

Inma Hernaez Rioja

Department of Signal Processing and Communi-cations, University of Vigo

Carmen García Mateo

Sweden University of Gothenburg Lars Borin Switzerland Idiap Research Institute Hervé Bourlard UK Institute for Language, Cognition and Computa-

tion, Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh

Steve Renals

School of Computer Science, University of Manchester

Sophia Ananiandou

Research Institute of Informatics & Language Processing, University of Wolverhampton

Ruslan Mitkov

Table 7: Composition of the META-NET Network of Excellence

6 Useful Links META-NET has published a large amount of relevant information and documents online. The inter-ested reader is referred to the following:

• META-NET website – http://www.meta-net.eu • META-SHARE website – http://www.meta-share.eu • Members of the META Technology Council – http://www.meta-net.eu/vision/technology-

council-members/all • Vision Group members – http://www.meta-net.eu/vision/vision-group-members/all • The Vision Paper: The Future Multilingual European Information Society –

http://www.meta-net.eu/vision/index_html/reports/meta-net-vision-paper.pdf • The META-NET Language White Paper Series – http://www.meta-net.eu/vision/whitepapers

7 Contact If you have any questions or comments related to the information in this document please contact Dr. Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany) at +49 30 23895-1833 or [email protected].

public report no. 2...technologies for the multilingual european information society public report...

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