4th ELRC Conference in Helsinki: Why Language Data Really Matters
On 26 – 27 November 2019, the 4th European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) Conference took place at the Radisson Blu Seaside in Helsinki (Finland). More than 150 participants attended from all EU Member States, Norway and Iceland.
Overall, the conference marked a major milestone in the life of ELRC, as for the first time, the ELRC White Paper “Sustainable Language Data Sharing to Support Language Equality in Multilingual Europe” was published. The White Paper includes the results of a two-year investigation on the infrastructures for sharing language resources in Europe and how language data sharing could be improved (cf. the dedicated article further down).
The 1st Conference Day focused on the major obstacles and barriers that were found to limit the sharing of language resources, one of them being the lack of understanding for the importance and value of language data.
ELRC Project Manager Dr. Andrea Lösch summarising event key takeaways (L)
Countdown to the ELRC Country Expo (R)
The 2nd Conference Day consisted of a Country Expo with one booth per Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)-affiliated country to facilitate match-making between different countries, public services and academic/non-academic solution providers.
The detailed programme and all conference presentations are available here.
The ELRC Network manages, maintains and coordinates the relevant language resources in all official languages of the EU and CEF-affiliated countries. It also Implements the acquisition of additional language resources and related language processing services, as well as their provision to the language resource repository of the CEF eTranslation Building Block.
The CEF eTranslation Building Block allows for easy access to the machine translation service for both people and machines and guarantees continuous service of high quality, with due consideration for the confidentiality and security of data during the translation process.
CEF eTranslation is a machine translation tool, which draws upon decades worth of work by EU translators and is designed to retain the format of structured documents during translation. It can translate multiple documents to multiple languages at once and guarantees continuous service of high quality, with due consideration for the confidentiality and security of data during the translation process.
CEF eTranslation can be integrated into an online site or service, making it multilingual; or used by officials in public administrations directly as a secure machine translation tool.