[lg policy] EU awards grants for low-resource languages

Mon Mar 25 15:07:37 UTC 2019

EU Awards USD 4.8m in Neural MT Grants for Low-Resource Languages
6 Hours Ago

Uncategorized <https://slator.com/uncategorized/> ·

By Gino Diño <https://slator.com/author/ginodino/>

On March 25, 2019
[image: EU Awards USD 4.8m in Neural MT Grants for Low-Resource Languages]

On February 27, 2019, the Connecting Europe Facility Telecommunications
(CEF Telecom) sector released the list of selected proposals
<https://ec.europa.eu/inea/en/news-events/newsroom/cef-telecom-almost-%E2%82%AC10.5-million-eu-investment-to-boost-european-digital>
in
the areas of Automated Translation, eDelivery, and eInvoicing for their
2018 work program. A total of over EUR 4.3m (USD 4.8m) has been earmarked
for five separate project proposals on Automated Translation.

CEF Telecom opened a call for proposals in July 2018
<https://slator.com/demand-drivers/eu-to-grant-eur-5m-for-low-resource-language-data-and-mt-implementation/>,
making available a maximum grant of EUR 5m per selected project. The call
for proposals aimed to further improve the capability of the European
Union’s neural machine translation (NMT) facility, eTranslation
<https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What+is+eTranslation+-+Overview>,
in translating low-resource languages.

Selected proposals are expected to implement NMT engines, collect more
training data for high-priority, low-resource languages, and assist in the
integration of the eTranslation facility into the EU’s other online
services that may require multilingual functionality.
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Automated Translation

CEF Telecom reportedly received 35 project proposals in response to the
call and ultimately selected five for Automated Translation, three for
eDelivery, and nine for eInvoicing. The total proposed maximum funding
allocated for all 17 exceeds EUR 10.3m (USD 11.6m).

The five project proposals selected for the Automated Translation section
of the work program and the maximum amount of funding earmarked for each
are as follows:
Proposal Coordinated by Recommended Funding (EUR)
PRINCIPLE – Providing Resources in Irish, Norwegian, Croatian and Icelandic
for Purposes of Language Engineering Dublin City University 1,138,781
OCCAM Brno University of Technology 973,894
EuroPat: Unleashing European Patent Translations University of Edinburgh
695,890
Continued Web-Scale Provision of Parallel Corpora for European
Languages University
of Edinburgh 889,649
Translation Automation Services for EU Council Presidency Tilde 620,800

Four language service and technology providers are involved in the listed
projects: Iconic Translation Machines, Prompsit, Omniscien Technologies,
and Tilde.

PRINCIPLE is a consortium among Dublin City University’s ADAPT Centre,
Dublin-based MT provider Iconic Translation Machines, the National Library
of Norway, the University of Zagreb, and the University of Iceland.
According to an article on the Iconic website
<https://iconictranslation.com/2019/03/iconics-consortium-awarded-contract-by-eu-for-over-e1-million-euro-for-neural-mt/>,
the consortium partners “will collaborate closely with government agencies,
national public administration bodies and data holders in Croatia, Iceland,
Ireland and Norway to ensure that the pooled language resources
appropriately cover the technology needs.”

The “Continued Web-Scale Provision of Parallel Corpora for European
Languages” proposal is a continuation of previous, similarly titled,
projects <https://www.dlsi.ua.es/eines/noticia.cgi?id=eng&idn=420> by the
same consortium, which includes the University of Edinburgh, the
Universitat d’Alacant, language industry organization TAUS, Spain-based ICT
company Prompsit Language Engineering, and Singapore-headquartered language
technology company Omniscien Technologies.

Meanwhile, Latvian MT company Tilde is responsible for Translation
Automation Services for the EU Council Presidency
<https://www.tilde.com/news/official-website-2018-eu-council-presidency-integrates-tildes-neural-mt-service>,
which provides the eTranslation platform with NMT for Bulgarian.
Millions of Euro into MT

Launched in November 2017
<https://ec.europa.eu/info/resources-partners/machine-translation-public-administrations-etranslation_en>,
the eTranslation facility is the NMT replacement of the EU’s previous
statistical MT solution called MT at EC. CEF said eTranslation is “trained
using the vast Euramis translation memories, comprising over 1 billion
sentences in the 24 official EU languages
<https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/Machine+Translation>
produced
by the translators of the EU institutions over the past decades.” Euramis
stands for “European advanced multilingual information system.”

MT plays a pivotal role in the EU’s efforts to overcome language barriers
in its vision of a Digital Single Market
<https://slator.com/demand-drivers/eu-spends-another-eur-2-4m-on-translation-research-for-digital-single-market/>.
According to the Language Technologies policy
<https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/language-technologies> of
the EU’s Digital Single Market strategy, current MT solutions available on
the market “usually don’t reach the required levels of quality, or only for
[a] limited number of languages, text types or topics.”

To address this, Horizon 2020 — the biggest EU research and innovation
program with a budget of EUR 80bn available from 2014 to 2020 — has been
funding various MT undertakings, such as a EUR 3m project
<https://slator.com/academia/the-european-union-takes-another-shot-at-machine-translation/>
for
the automated translation of Massive Open Online Courses.
At the same time, CEF “addresses the additional challenge of creating a
complete infrastructure for language resources and processing tools.” CEF
has funded efforts such as a EUR 5.8m initial tender
<https://slator.com/deal-wins/europe-awards-eur-5-8m-to-tackle-digital-markets-language-problem/>
to
build a standalone Automated Translation service building upon MT at EC (at
the time), a EUR 1.9m project
<https://slator.com/deal-wins/eu-spends-eur-1-9m-to-customize-mt-for-state-and-regional-authorities/>
to
customize MT for state and regional authorities, a EUR 2.4m research project
<https://slator.com/demand-drivers/eu-spends-another-eur-2-4m-on-translation-research-for-digital-single-market/>
for
automated translation and, now, this EUR 4.3m for low-resource languages.

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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