International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms (Marseille, 16 May 2020)

ELG Workshop on LT platformsWe are seeing an increasing number of platforms and infrastructures in the areas of language technologies (LT), natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), speech, interaction and language-centric artificial intelligence (AI).

This has produced a growing need to share experiences, approaches and best practices. What is also needed, is collaboration towards platform interoperability and, why not, towards a global language grid.

With this aim in mind, the European Language Grid, a EU-funded consortium of language technology research centers, associations and companies, will be organising a first international workshop on language technology platforms in Marseille (France) on 16 May 2020.

(Update: this workshop has been cancelled due to coronavirus.)

 

Among the key topics to be discussed at this workshop are platforms and infrastructure architectures, containerisation and virtualisation technologies, APIs for applications and services, data and metadata exchange formats, operational policies and governance structures, legal aspects, billing and business models etc.

The workshop will address all smaller and larger language grids, language-related infrastructures, platform initiatives (including general and domain-specific) as well as collaborative research projects that touch upon one or more of the topics mentioned above, both in Europe and world-wide. The workshop objective is to exchange and discuss observations, experiences, challenges, solutions and best practices.

The workshop will also addresses the issue of fragmentation in the language technology landscape. Instead of “platform islands” that simply exist side by side, possibly even competing with each other, initiatives should discuss how their platforms can be made interoperable and how they can interact with one another to create synergies towards a productive platform ecosystem.

Finally, the workshop will also cover community-related aspects that need to be addressed and strengthened through open discussions and further joint development.

Nancy Ide, Professor of Computer Science at Vassar College, New York (USA), has been invited for a keynote “Towards a Global Language Grid – Challenges and Opportunities”. The deadline for paper submissions is 21 February 2020. (Update: deadline extended to 28 February 2020)


European Language Grid

This workshop is an initiative of the European Language Grid consortium, a EU project (ELG; 2019-2021) aimed at creating a platform that will provide thousands of data sets and hundreds of language technology services. ELG aims to promote technologies tailored to all European languages and cultures, adapted to their social and economic needs.

Consortium members are the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (Greece), University of Sheffield (UK), Charles University (Czech Republic), European Language Resources Association (ELRA-ELDA), Tilde (Latvia), SAIL LABS (Spain), Expert System Iberia (Spain) and University of Edinburgh (UK).

The European Language Grid has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

 

For more detailed information about the 1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms (IWLTP 2020), please visit the European Language Grid website.

 

Additional information