About the innovator

LETA is the National News Agency of Latvia. Innovation Labs at LETA participates in numerous H2020, Google DNI and National research projects together with BBC, Deutche Welle, University of Edinburgh, University of Latvia, QCRI, Priberam and others aimed at application of the cutting edge Natural Language Processing technologies in the media companies.

Leta project's on Twitter

What is the innovation

The developed technologies are widely used in the participating Media companies - Automatic Speech Recognition, Neural Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition and Linking, Automated Summarisation, Video subtitling, translation and voice-over are among the technologies actually introduced into production by our Innovation Lab.

Out of the lab. Into the market

Our innovations are already used in production in the participating Media organizations. Where we have stumbled, though, is monetisation of our innovations. Media companies are rather resource-striped by the falling advertising income or regulated state financing. Therefore, so far we have opted for open-sourcing the developed solutions and funding the further development via gradual development and maintenance agreements.
  We have tried to copy trint.com approach for selling NLP services, but this has failed due to LETA not being the only participant in the H2020 consortium developing these solutions. So, we are still in the search of the right way to capitalise on this new technology.

Benefits of participation in Horizon 2020

Participation in the H2020 SUMMA project has helped immensely via extensive know-how exchange among the consortium partners. For example, from University of Edinburgh we have acquired the state-of-art Automatic Speech Recognition and Machine Translation technologies and best practices. Together with Proberam in Portugal we have developed the state-of-art Named Entity Recognition and Summarisation technologies.
  On the other hand LETA has provides its expertise in the Software Engineering best practices to scale these solutions to the industrial BigData usage scenarios. We have also jointly improved our Deep Learning skills across the board.

Team behind the innovation

/futurium/en/file/caversham-meeting-1482x635jpgcaversham-meeting-1482x635.jpg

Video