SWC Participate in a Consortium of 53 Organisations to Shape the Future of European Language Technology

Project ELE (European Language Equality) is a pilot project that will lay the foundations for Digital Language Equality in Europe by 2030. It began on January 1st 2021 and will end on June 30th 2022. The project is funded through Pilot Project/Preparatory Action (PP/PA), which is a tool for formulating political priorities and introducing new initiatives that might turn into standing EU activities and programs.

ELE aims to address the challenges of linguistic discrimination and language barriers to communication and the free flow of information in the EU. The project will draw up a sustainable evidence-based strategic research agenda and a roadmap to achieve full digital language equality of all languages used within the European Union through the effective use of language technologies. The recent breakthroughs in language technologies offer very cost-effective multilingual solutions.

By creating the conditions to ensure that no European languages remain under-resourced, ELE has the potential to influence the European language technologies landscape for the next 10-15 years. In this way, the project will contribute to establishing a fair, inclusive and sustainable Multilingual Digital Single Market based on equality. Putting all European languages on an equal footing will also act as a multiplier of opportunities. Finally, it will instigate regional, national and EU-wide collaboration among scientists from academia and industry.

SWC is one of 53 partners in the ELE project consortium and will contribute to all work packages but mainly in the work regarding the development of the strategic agenda and roadmap in 2030. We will focus on Deliverable 2.16 that describes the usage of natural language in data and metadata.

ELE started with a virtual kick-off meeting on the 15th of January where the consortium partners were introduced and the project work packages were outlined. Learn more about the ELE project!