... With 500 million European citizens, 27 Member States and
23 official languages (not to mention some 60 other languages which are
part of the European heritage and are spoken in many regions or
specific groups), there is huge scope and potential for enriching our
online lives. Online content and services proliferate but are not
necessarily accessible and exploitable for everyone. This is one of the
objectives of i2010 – creating a single information space - and
i2010 – creating a single information space
Welcome
to the website of Objective 2.2 – Language-based interaction. Unit E1
– Language technologies, machine translation of Directorate General
Information Society and Media, is the Unit in the Commission in charge
of this objective. We want to make our site more than just a dry list
of links so we propose to give you on our pages information not only on
the objective itself and the related Calls for proposals and such, but
also information on how the area of language technologies interacts and
overlaps with many other areas such as multilingualism, translation,
semantic web, and so on. We will show you how our work fits into the
big picture at European level, and what other people and organisations
are doing, from national and international programmes to the global
view. With 500 million European citizens, 27 Member States and
23 official languages (not to mention some 60 other languages which are
part of the European heritage and are spoken in many regions or
specific groups), there is huge scope and potential for enriching our
online lives. Online content and services proliferate but are not
necessarily accessible and exploitable for everyone. This is one of the
objectives of i2010 – creating a single information space - and this in
turn means addressing the issues of multilingualism on the Web. With
this in mind, the focus of work in our unit has shifted to language
technologies, in particular machine translation and cross-lingual
information access.
Our objective in
the ICT Work Programme for 2009-2010 will focus on language-based
interaction. The expected outcomes are new models, architectures and
tools for effective data-driven, self-learning machine translation
systems, including the provision of specific solutions for key
application domains. Another target outcome is the creation of a
virtual institute which will bring the relevant communities and
disciplines closer together, to foster the sharing of knowledge and
encourage networking amongst different players.
