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
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 Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Germany
T4ME are:
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
Alt-Moabit 91c
10559 Berlin, Germany
office@meta-net.eu
Phone: +49 (30) 23895-1833
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, without permission from the copyright owner.
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Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society
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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 3
Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society
Public Report No. 2
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 industries, provider industries, administrators, politicians, integrators etc.). Significant steps towards 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 Localisation”, “Media and Information Services” and “Interactive Systems”. Furthermore, METANET 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 directions 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 companies 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 METANET. 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 communication and cooperation across languages, secure users of any language equal access to information and knowledge (especially with regard to the common digital market), build upon
and advance functionalities of networked information technology.
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 consortium decision at the kick-off meeting, META-NET and META-SHARE are now the main brand names that
replace T4ME and ORI.
1
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A concerted, substantial, continent-wide effort in language technology research and engineering is needed for realising applications that enable automatic translation, multilingual information
and knowledge management and content production across all
European languages. This effort will also enhance the development 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 Technology Alliance (META), bringing together researchers, commercial technology providers, private and corporate language technology 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 information 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 bridges to neighbouring technology fields (Section 3.1), designing and implementing METASHARE (Section 3.2) and building a European LT Community and Strategic Research Agenda (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 (combining 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 results 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 taggers 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 resources 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 Istanbul. 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 techniques 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 collections (publications, multimedia files, datasets, applications, etc.) has drastically transformed
the requirements for their archiving, publication, discovery and long-term maintenance. Digital repositories provide the infrastructure for storing, preserving, describing, and making
this information publicly available in an open, user-friendly and trusted way. Such repositories 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 inventories 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 eventually be an important component of the language technology marketplace for HLT researchers
and developers, language professionals (translators, interpreters, content and software localisation 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 common interfaces. Users (consumers, providers or aggregators) will have single sign-on accounts 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 repositories. 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. METASHARE 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 METAFORUM 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 METAFORUM 2011 in June and went live shortly afterwards. Each subsequent iteration improves
various features and adds new functionality. Currently, before the public release due February 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:
Apr. 2011:
June 2011:
July 2011:
Nov. 2011:
Feb. 2012:
July 2012:
V0 (preliminary pre-release demo’ed at META-FORUM 2010)
V0.1 (first prototype of metadata editor)
V1 prototype (publicly accessible demo at META-FORUM 2011)
V1 (basic release)
V1.1
V2 public release (open source release with extended functionality)
V3 (community release)
3.3 Towards a European LT Community and a Strategic Research Agenda
The third area of META-NET is concerned with bringing together the highly fragmented European Language Technology community and with preparing, establishing and successfully
implementing a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) with the ultimate goal of overcoming language 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 these visions into the SRA.
3.3.1 Vision Groups
As META-NET strives to bring Europe’s Language Technology industry not only scientifically, but also economically into a leading position, the Vision Groups are primarily composed
of distinguished stakeholders from industry and business, supplemented by leading researchers from the respective fields.
The Vision Groups bring together the different Language Technology communities and industries. 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 identifies key visions for the future as well as outlining the importance of the socio-economic context 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 provided a basis for further discussions about the development of the SRA.
Fields
Stakeholders
Conveners
Members
Technical documentation, consumer information, official bulletins, user interface
localisation, games, services, etc.
Software companies, game companies, large users of translation services, translation companies, localisation industry, etc.
Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI, Germany), Josef van Genabith (DCU/CNGL, Ireland)
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 (Stanford 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
Stakeholders
Conveners
Members
3
Audiovisual sector, news, digital libraries, portals, search engines, etc.
Media industries, web and search engine providers, archives, etc.
Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, Greece), Margaretha Mazura (EMF, Belgium/UK)
Toni Badia (BM), Nozha Boujemaa (INRIA), Nicoletta Calzolari (CNR), Marin Dimi-
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 Francopoulo (LIMSI), Robert Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield), Gregory Grefenstette
(Exalead), Marko Grobelnik (JSI), Christopher Kermorvant (A2iA), MariaKoutsombogera (ILSP), Claude de Loupy (Syllabs), Margaretha Mazura (EMF), Alexandre Passant (DERI), Stelios Piperidis (ILSP), Georg Rehm (DFKI), Sergi Sagàs (MediaPro), Alessandro Tescari (Pervoice), Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI), Philippe Wacker
(EMF), Jakub Zavrel (Textkernel)
Table 2: Vision Group Media and Information Services
Fields
Stakeholders
Conveners
Members
Mobile assistance, dialogue translation, call centres, etc.
Mobile software and service providers, telecom industry, call centres, games industries, etc.
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI/CNRS, France), Bernardo Magnini (FBK, Italy)
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 Geoffrois (DGA), Joakim Gustafson (KTH), Jan Hajic (Charles University Prague), Paul
Heisterkamp (Daimler), Mattias Heldner (KTH), Arjan van Hessen (Telecats, Twente University), Timo Honkela (Aalto University), Simon King (University of Edinburgh), 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 METAFORUM 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 reports. The SRA is currently being drafted by members of the Technology Council and is expected to be finalised early in 2012. It will be publicly launched at META-FORUM 2012.
Name
Affiliation
Role
Michaela Bartelt
Electronic Arts
Will Burgett
Intel Corporation
Mirko Silvestrini
European Union of Associations
of Translation Companies (EUATC)
Consiglio Nazionale d. Ricerche
Microsoft Research
Dublin City University, CNGL
European Captioning Institute
Exalead
Charles University
Nicoletta Calzolari
Bill Dolan
Josef van Genabith
Yota Georgakopolou
Gregory Grefenstette
Jan Hajic
9
Country
General Manager for
localisation (Europe
and Asia)
Localisation Program
Manager
President
Germany
Director of Research
Head of NLP
Director
Managing Director
Chief Science Officer
Professor
Italy
USA
Ireland
UK, Greece
France
Czech Republic
USA
Italy
Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society
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Theo Hoffenberg
Thomas Hofmann
Keith Jeffrey
Stefan Kreckwitz
Claude de Loupy
Elisabeth Maier
Daniel Marcu
Softissimo
Google
ERCIM
Across
Syllabs
CLS Communication
Language Weaver
CTO
Dir. Engineering
President
CTO
CEO
CTO
CTO
Joseph Mariani
Jaap van der Meer
Roger Moore
Stelios Piperidis
Gabor Proszeky
Georg Rehm
C.M. Sperberg-McQueen
Daniel Tapias
Alessandro Tescari
Hans Uszkoreit
Andrejs Vasiljevs
Alex Waibel
CNRS-LIMSI, IMMI
TAUS
University of Sheffield
ILSP, Research Centre “Athena”
Morphologic
DFKI
World Wide Web Consortium
Sigma Technologies
Pervoice
DFKI
Tilde
CMU, University of Karlsruhe
Director
Director
Professor
Head of Department
CEO
Senior Consultant
Technical Staff
CEO
CEO
Scientific Director
CEO
Professor
Johannes Bursch
Daimler AG
László Podhorányi
Elie Znaty
Vodafone
Vecsys
Head of Corporate Language Management
Vice Director General
Director
France
Switzerland
UK
Germany
France
Switzerland
USA, Romania
France
Netherlands
UK
Greece
Hungary
Germany
USA
Spain
Italy
Germany
Latvia
USA/Germa
ny
Germany
Hungary
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 language 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 communicative device to draw attention to the importance of our languages and Language Technology and to show the potential of the field.
META-NET partners have produced Language White Papers for the following languages:
Basque
Bulgarian
Catalan
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Icelandic
Irish
Italian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Maltese
Norwegian
Polish
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Estonian
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Hungarian
Portuguese
Romanian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovene
Spanish
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 resulted 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 activities, 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 Virtual 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 instruments 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 participated 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
Conference “Language Technology for Multilingual
Applications” organized by the European Parliament
Joint kick-off meeting CESAR, METANET4U, META-NORD
Opening of German/Austrian W3C Office at DFKI
CICling 2011
Japanese Workshop for Machine Translation
Meeting of Representatives of European Language
11
Date
Luxembourg
Jan. 27
Luxembourg
Feb. 8-10
Berlin, Germany
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo, Japan
Copenhagen, Denmark
Feb. 10
Feb. 22
Feb. 23
March 08
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Councils
TRALOGY
Vision Group “Interactive Systems”
Vision Group “Media and Information Services”
Meeting of the “LT Berlin” working group
Vision Group “Translation and Localisation”
Attensity Forum 2011
META Technology Council Meeting
META-FORUM 2011
Media for All
EUROLAN 2011 Summer School
RANLP 2011
Multilingual Web Workshop
ML4HMT Workshop at MT Summit
Workshop Language Technology for a Multilingual
Europe at GSCL 2011
GSCL 2011: “Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications”
META-NET Network Meeting and General Assembly
NPLD Assembly
EFNIL Conference
ML4HMT-11 Workshop
Paris, France
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Vienna, Austria
Berlin, Germany
Prague, Czech Republic
Berlin, Germany
Venice
Budapest
London
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Hissar, Bulgaria
Limerick, Ireland
Xiamen, China
Hamburg, Germany
March 3/4
March 28
April 1
April 4
April 7/8
May 6
May 25
June 27/28
Jun. 29-July 1
Aug. 28-Sep. 4
Sep. 12-14
Sep. 21/22
Sep. 19-23
Sep. 27
Hamburg, Germany
Sep. 28-30
Berlin, Germany
Eskilstuna, SE
London, UK
Barcelona, Spain
Oct. 21/22
Oct. 25/26
Oct. 26
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.ltworld.org). The website also hosts a blog which is used for publishing relevant news and stories as well as detailed information and relevant documents on the project’s work.
The multilingual META-NET website makes available, among others, information on METASHARE, 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 information 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 partners were joined by consortia from three PSP projects, CESAR, METANET4U and METANORD to enlarge the Network of Excellence. The extended network now consists of 54
members in 33 countries.
Country
Austria
Member (Affiliation)
Zentrum für Translationswissenschaft, Universität Wien
13
Contacts
Gerhard Budin
Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society
Public Report No. 2
Belgium
Bulgaria
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Rep.
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Computational Linguistics and
Psycholinguistics Research Centre (CLiPS), University of Antwerp
Centre for Processing Speech and Images, University of Leuven
Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian
Academy of Sciences
Institute of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities
and Social Science, University of Zagreb
Language Centre, School of Humanities
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics,
Charles University in Prague
Centre for Language Technology, University of
Copenhagen
Institute of Computer Science, University of
Tartu
Computational Cognitive Systems Research
Group, Aalto University
Department of General Linguistics, University of
Helsinki
CNRS, LIMSI
ELDA
DFKI
RWTH Aachen
Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University
ILSP, R.C. “Athena”
Research Institute for Linguistics,
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Department of Telecommunications and Media
Informatics, Budapest Technical University
School of Humanities, University of Iceland
Dublin City University
Department of Computer Sciences, Bar-Ilan
University
Consiglio Nazionale Ricerche
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Tilde
Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science,
University of Latvia
Institute of the Lithuanian Language
Arax Ltd.
Department Intelligent Computer Systems, University of Malta
CLCG/Computational Linguistics, University of
Groningen
Universiteit Utrecht
University of Bergen
Dep. of Informatics, Language Technology
Group, University of Oslo
Institute of Computer Science,
Polish Academy of Sciences
University of Lódz
Department of Computer Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, Adam Mickiewicz University
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Walter Daelemans
Dirk van Compernolle
Svetla Koeva
Marko Tadic
Jack Burston
Jan Hajic
Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Bente
Maegaard
Tiit Roosmaa
Timo Honkela
Kimmo Koskenniemi, Krister
Linden
Joseph Mariani
Khalid Choukri
Hans Uszkoreit, Georg Rehm
Hermann Ney
Manfred Pinkal
Stelios Piperidis
Tamás Váradi
Géza Németh, Gábor Olaszy
Eirikur Rögnvaldsson
Josef van Genabith
Ido Dagan
Nicoletta Calzolari
Bernardo Magnini
Andrejs Vasiljevs
Inguna Skadina
Jolanta Zabarskaitė
Vartkes Goetcherian
Mike Rosner
Gertjan van Noord
Jan Odijk
Koenraad De Smedt
Stephan Oepen
Adam Przepiórkowski, Maciej
Ogrodniczuk
Barbara L.-Tomaszczyk, Piotr
Pęzik
Zygmunt Vetulani
Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society
Public Report No. 2
Portugal
Romania
Serbia
Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon
Spoken Language Systems Lab, Institute for
Systems Engineering and Computers
Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence,
Romanian Academy of Sciences
Faculty of Computer Science, University Alexandru Ioan Cuza
Faculty of Mathematics, Belgrade University
Antonio Branco
Isabel Trancoso
Dan Tufis
Dan Cristea
Dusko
Vitas,
Cvetana
Krstev,
Ivan Obradovic
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
UK
Pupin Institute
Ludovit Stur Institute of Linguistics, Slovak
Academy of Sciences
Jozef Stefan Institute
Barcelona Media
Center for Language and Speech Technologies
and Applications, Technical University of Catalonia
Institut Universitari de Lingüistica Aplicada,
University Pompeu Fabra
Aholab Signal Processing Laboratory
University of the Basque Country
Department of Signal Processing and Communications, University of Vigo
University of Gothenburg
Idiap Research Institute
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, Centre for Speech Technology Research,
University of Edinburgh
School of Computer Science,
University of Manchester
Research Institute of Informatics & Language
Processing, University of Wolverhampton
Sanja Vranes
Radovan Garabik
Marko Grobelnik
Toni Badia
Asunción Moreno
Núria Bel
Inma Hernaez Rioja
Carmen García Mateo
Lars Borin
Hervé Bourlard
Steve Renals
Sophia Ananiandou
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 interested 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/technologycouncil-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 georg.rehm@dfki.de.
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