Press Release: LangTech 2002

Thu Jun 20 06:32:05 UTC 2002

Please accept our apologies for the multiple announcements

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ELRA & ELDA are happy to announce the following event:
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LANGTECH 2002:

NEW INTERNATIONAL EC SUPPORTED CONFERENCE DEDICATED
TO SPEECH AND LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES.

Paris, France, 17th June 2002

Speech and language technologies, a sector with growing relevance
to the European business marketplace, will be the focus of a comprehensive
industry forum: LangTech 2002, to be held in Berlin on September 26-27, 2002.

The pace of commercial deployment of speech and language technologies
has lead to strong calls for a high-level industry conference to showcase
advancements and bring developers, entrepreneurs and researchers together
with integrators, investors and corporations.

LangTech 2002 will address the state of play from an industrial, R&D and
academic viewpoint and demonstrate the potential to corporations to improve
business processes through the adoption of speech and language technologies.

Examples of contemporary language technologies in action include speech
recognition interfaces, website translation tools, content management
systems and
cross lingual search engines.  These technologies have found applicability
in real
world contexts from CRM to e-commerce and software localisation.

LangTech is an EC supported initiative, through the involvement of EUROMAP
Language Technologies.
Bente Maegaard, Central Co-ordinator, EUROMAP, stated,
"we view LangTech as an important development in bringing together the
various parties
comprising the language technologies sector for high level interaction and
discussion.
The conference is particularly useful for smaller concept developers
seeking a valuable
promotional platform."

Agenda topics address the latest technology breakthroughs and are presented by
experienced practitioners in the field. Practical solutions and near-market
research results
are presented during the conference and in the accompanying exhibition, showing
state-of-the-art products and solutions. Special 'pitch' sessions will
enable SME's and
start-up companies to promote their concepts and explore financing
possibilities, and a
funding session will highlight the venture capital community views on
language technology
investment.

Speaking contributions have already been secured from leading industry
players including SAP,
LingTech, DaimlerChrysler and Conexor. Noted technology scientist,
Professor Wolfgang Wahlster,
from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), will
make a keynote address.

Members of the press are cordially invited to apply for press accreditation
for LangTech 2002
via organisation at lang-tech.org.

Delegate registration for LangTech 2002 is available via the official
conference website
http://www.lang-tech.org, along with updated information on programme and
speakers.
Registrations received before July 1, 2002 will benefit from a discounted
'early bird' delegate fee.

Companies and institutions wishing to take advantage of the LangTech 2002
exhibition area
should contact: Khalid Choukri, exhibition at lang-tech.org.

ABOUT LANGTECH:

Date: September 26-27, 2002

Venue: Hotel Schweizerhof, Berlin

Description: LangTech 2002 is the international forum for people and
organisations involved in
the development, deployment and exploitation of spoken and written language
technologies in
real world applications. It will feature keynote talks from leading
players, presentations from a
wide range of developers and solution providers, panel discussions of key
issues affecting the
market in Europe and beyond, and an exhibition of applications, products,
services and research
prototypes. Special sessions will enable start-up companies to promote and
pitch their
products and services and explore funding possibilities.

LangTech 2002 will cover a wide range of language technologies with three
focus areas:

VOICE SOLUTIONS: for the control of software and machinery, customer
relationship
management, systems for the handicapped and multimodal communication in an
ambient
intelligence setting.
KNOWLEDGE SOLUTIONS: for information and knowledge management, content
management, e-learning, document authoring and management.
MULTILINGUAL SOLUTIONS: for software localisation, automatic text
translation, translation
memories, interactive speech translation and crosslingual information
retrieval.

LangTech 2002 is organised by EUROMAP Language Technologies, assisted by
the German
National Competence Center for Language Technology funded by the German
Ministry for
Education and Research, the Investmentbank Berlin, the European Language
and Speech
Network (ELSNET), European Language Resources Association and Evaluation
and Language
resources Distribution Agency (ELRA and ELDA) and several other corporate
sponsors.

Email: organisation at lang-tech.org

Conference website: http://www.lang-tech.org

Press Registration: organisation at lang-tech.org

Contact:
Michael Huch
VDI/VDE-Technology Centre for Information Technologies
Email: organisation at lang-tech.org
Tel: +49 33 28 435 193
http://www.lang-tech.org

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Magali Jeanmaire
Marketing & Communication
55-57, rue Brillat-Savarin
75013 Paris FRANCE
Tel: (+33) 1 43 13 33 33
Fax: (+33) 1 43 13 33 30
Internet: http://www.icp.inpg.fr/ELRA/ or http://www.elda.fr
LREC: http://www.lrec-conf.org
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