European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) Workshop
Valletta, Malta, Friday 26 February 2016
Universal access to public services across language barriers
Languages and linguistic diversity are at the heart of European culture but can turn into an obstacle when they prevent unbiased access to public services or hinder free access to information. The EC’s Automated Translation platform aims to lower language barriers for national public administrations in areas including consumer rights, health, public procurement, social security, culture and other online services
The underlying technology is a statistical machine translation system which learns how to translate from existing translations. To better suit the needs of public services across Europe, the system needs to be trained on large quantities of data that is relevant to local national administrations. This includes existing translations as well as monolingual text from the respective source and target languages.
The European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC), has been set up to help gather such data and is organising a local workshop in Malta to raise awareness about the importance of language data held by public administrations.
At the Maltese national workshop, organised in collaboration with the University of Malta and the European Commission Representation in Malta, speakers from the University of Malta, the European Commission, government bodies, and language service providers, will work together to understand the needs of national public sector administrations with regard to automated translation, to jointly identify relevant sources of multi-lingual language resources, and discuss any technical and legal issues involved in the use of data for automated translation.
For further details please contact Mike Rosner, Department of Intelligent Computer Systems.