EU

The project has received funding from the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme under Grant Agreement nº 270893.

Highlights

 

António Branco was invited to write an opinion piece in the national monthly magazine Exame Informática (in Portuguese)

 

António Branco was invited to write an opinion piece in the magazine Exame Informática.

Exame Informática is a national monthly magazine specialised in technology and gadgets and features a wide variety of news covering various areas of Information Technology and Communication. This magazine is also available online on the Exame Informática site.

This opinion piece " A Língua Portuguesa no Choque Digital" (The Portuguese Language in the Digital Shock) highlights the need to strategically defend the Portuguese language and give a greater support to research on Portuguese, (p.22; janeiro2013, Nº 211, Exame Informática).

 

Jump to the top

 

António Branco was interviewed on multinational radio station RDP Africa on a science news radio programme about the challenges of the Portuguese language in the digital age on the 29th of December of 2012 (in Portuguese)

 

António Branco was interviewed on multinational radio station RDP Africa on a science news radio programme about the challenges of the Portuguese language in the digital age (in Portuguese)

The program "Cientifica Mente" is a weekly radio programme about research, innovation and development projects with broadcasts Saturdays at 09:40 and repeats Mondays at 19:30. This program is led by Ana Paula Gomes, experienced journalist in the area of science journalism in Portugal.

This interview with duration of 24 minutes was about the Portuguese language in the digital age and focused on the challenges for European languages in the digital age, especially for the Portuguese, highlighting the crucial role of language technology.

 

This text will be replaced

 

To listen to the full programme please visit the programme site.

 

Jump to the top

 

Op-ed article in Portuguese newspaper Expresso.

 

The weekly newspaper Expresso, the reference newspaper in Portugal, published Saturday 8th of December, 2012, an op-ed article by António Branco "Portuguese Language: A giant with clay feet in the digital age" (in Portuguese: "A Língua Portuguesa: Um gigante com pés de barro na era digital").

This article highlights the need to strategically develop language technology for the Portuguese language to support its global role as the 5th language with the largest number of speakers in the world.

 

first second

 

Jump to the top

 

40 minute interview broadcasted by the national radio RTP - Antena 1 on the results reported in the White Paper "The Portuguese Language in the Digital Age" (in Portuguese).

 

António Branco was interviewed on the national radio RTP - Antena 1 on the science news radio programme "Os Dias do Futuro". This weekly science news radio programme is led by Edgar Canelas, experienced journalist in the area of science journalism in Portugal. The programme with duration of 50 minutes is generally about research, innovation and development projects.

This program was about the Portuguese language in the digital age and the interview focused on the challenges for European languages in the digital age, especially for the Portuguese, highlighting the crucial role of language technology.

 

This text will be replaced

 

To listen to the full programme please visit the programme site.

 

Jump to the top

 

TV report on "Language technology" on AUTONOMA TV (in Portuguese).

 

Following the international workshop and the launch of the White Paper "The Portuguese Language in the Digital Age", António Branco gave an interview to AUTONOMA TV.

The AUTONOMA TV news report focuses on the importance of Language Technology and the role of the White Paper series on "The Languages in the European Union of the Information Society" and highlights the challenges for each language regarding the development of language technology in the preservation of a multilingual Europe in the digital age.

This interview also stresses the state of development of language technology for Portuguese language and its consolidation as a language for international communication with global projection in the digital age, in the scope of this emerging technology.

Besides the promotional video available online, also published an article on the Portuguese White Paper.

 

 

The full interview and article can be read here.

 

Jump to the top

 

The English Language White Paper was launched at the 34th annual Translating and the Computer Conference

 

The English White Paper was launched at the 34th annual Translating and the Computer Conference held on 29th and 30th November 2012, in the very heart of London.

The conference took place in the impressive surroundings of One Birdcage Walk, regarded as one of the the finest examples of traditional architecture in Westminster, just a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace. META-NET was represented by John McNaught and Paul Thompson, from the National Centre for Text Mining at the University of Manchester.

The conference was attended by an international audience of translators, language technology and machine translation professionals, as well as researchers working in these areas.

The conference consisted of a number of talks concerning the latest developments in translation and machine translation, including a talk by John McNaught to introduce META-NET and the White Paper Series.
A META-NET exhibition booth was also strategically placed in the refreshment area, ensuring a large amount of interest from and interaction with conference delegates about the META-NET during coffee and lunch breaks. The booth included posters about META-NET, META-SHARE and the White Paper series, and take-home packs were available containing more detailed information about META-SHARE, and executive summaries of the English White Paper and the Strategic Research Agenda. Additionally, all delegate bags contained a META-NET flyer.

Given the recurring themes in the conference talks about increased use of technology in translation work, and the need for interoperability of technologies, the work of META-NET was considered particularly appropriate.

 

 

Photo shows John McNaught at the exhibition booth

 

Jump to the top

 

Workshop "Digital Survival of Maltese: building a roadmap" - Valletta, Malta, November 24, 2012

 

Part of the International Series of Workshops on New Technologies and the Future of Languages, the workshop "Digital Survival of Maltese: building a roadmap" was held on November 24th, 2012, at the Foundation for International Studies, in Valletta. The launch of the Maltese Language White Paper took place during this workshop.

 

 

The meeting consisted of an invited presentation from a leader in the language resources field, followed by a series of moderated discussions taking place in parallel. This was concluded with a plenary session in which moderators presented their findings.

The main aim of this meeting was to formulate a roadmap for the digital future of Maltese that defines a set of strategic goals in three different areas impacted by language technology. (i) Education and Research (ii) National Language Policy and (iii) Language-Related Industries.
Representatives from all these areas were present at the workshop.

The issues raised during this meeting will be refined and will constitute the starting point of drafting a strategic agenda for the digital future of Maltese.

 

first second

 

Jump to the top

 

 

Participation in iberSPEECH2012 a joint event of VII Jornadas de Tecnología del Habla and III Iberian SL Tech Workshop

 

 

 

The Language White Papers of the four official languages spoken in Spain: Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish were presented and distributed in the Iberspeech 2012 conference.

More than 150 industrial researchers, journalists and academics attended the event.

We had a permanent booth at the entrance of the main conference room. In addition, a poster presentation of the results of the four LWPs received quite a lot of visitors. Authors of the four LWPs participate in the event and in the poster presentation.

 

first second

 

Jump to the top

 

ULX participation at the national ICT trade fair and APDC congress with a promotional booth

 

 

This year, the ULX participated once again in the APDC Congress and largest ICT trade fair targeted at the industry sector in Portugal.

The 22nd Communications Congress, organized by APDC - Portuguese Association for the Development of Communication, was held in Lisbon, in November, 21-22, 2012.

During the official opening of the Innovation Lounge, the President of Portugal, Prof. Aníbal Cavaco Silva, visited our booth and we had the chance to give him a copy of the Portuguese Language White Paper concerning the computational processing of the Portuguese language and to explain what language technology can do for a multilingual Europe.

first second

 

Jump to the top

 

Workshop "The Portuguese Language in the Digital Age" held in Lisbon, 26th of November, 2012

 

 

The International Workshop: "The Portuguese Language in the Digital Age", organized by the Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, integrated in the International Series of Workshops on New Technologies and the Future of Languages, was held last November 16, 2012, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The launch of the Portuguese Language White Paper took place during this workshop.

 

 

The workshop was open to everyone interested in the Portuguese language and brought together representatives from various areas from the key decision makers on Language and R&D policies, to LT industry representatives, researchers and students.

This workshop and the presentation of the Portuguese Language White Paper had a live streaming presentation online.

 

first second

 

Jump to the top

 

UAIC and RACAI presented the METANET4U project in the CNCI - National Conference on Research and Innovation, in Bucharest, Romania, November, 7 - 9, 2012

 

The Universitatea "A. I. Cuza" Iasi and Institutul of Cercetari pentru Inteligenta Artificiala participated with a booth in the Romanian Research Exhibition area at the National Conference of Research and Innovation, was held on the 7-9 November in Bucharest, Romania.

The UAIC and RACAI's booth at the exhibition area of the National Conference of Research and Innovation showed a set of eight posters.

The posters were on various resources and tools built and distributed by METANET4U project (eg rombac, TTL tools - lemmatizer, tokenizer, tagger, chunker, parser discourse, anaphora resolution motor-RARE, eDTLR etc) and accurat (cascading SMT).

UAIC displayed the posters on the first day of the exhibition and RACAI on the second day.

All the booths had a banner with the name of the exhibitor(s) written with letters of 25 cm.

 

first second

 

Jump to the top

 

The METANET4U project Language White Paper's Roadshow

 

 

The METANET4U project Roadshow is rolling out.

November 2012 is the month of intensive dissemination in our European tour, with the following workshops taking place:

16 Nov, Lisbon

20-23 Nov, Madrid

24 Nov, Valletta

29-30 Nov, London

 

These workshops were preceded by the workshop in Romania:

26-27 Sept, Bucharest

 

All these are events in our series of workshops

"New Technologies and the Future of Languages"

 

Jump to the top

 

Organization of a workshop on language technology in the scope of the conference "Diaspora in the scientific research and higher education in Romania"

 

METANET4U project members, Dan Tufiș and Dan Cristea, will be organizing the workshop "Research on Linguistic technologies in Romania and in the diaspora (LT4RD - Language Technologies for R&D)" in the scope of the conference "Diaspora in the scientific research and higher education in Romania" which will take place at Bucharest, Romania on the 26th and 27th of September, 2012.

 

 

Besides presenting the new achievements in different domains, other major aims of this conference include: deciding over the newly introduced methodology of habilitation, propose new funding programs and decide the priority domains for them. This year, the language technology domain has been invited to participate at these discussions. The session dedicated to human language technology (the LT4RD workshop) has the following major objectives:

 

1. Integration and increase of the visibility of research in computational linguistics, both nationally, by linking interdisciplinary activities of the areas involved, and world-wide, by correlating with the research in the Diaspora (dissemination).

 

2. Habilitation and auditing human resources (in terms of the methodology of CNATDCU - National Council for the Recognition of Degrees, Diplomas and Higher Education Certificates) starting from the national juridical framework, correlated with the situation of the researchers in the Diaspora (assessment, recommendations).

 

3. Identifying the opportunities to continue and broaden the collaborations with long-term impact on the following plans: scientific (launching research projects, joint development and sharing of resources and language technologies), educational (master and PhD programs in collaboration, mobility) and Industrial (collaboration in the research, development and innovation strategy).

 

 

For more information about the LT4RD workshop and its activities visit the official site (in Romanian).

 

Jump to the top

 

 

UPF and UPC presentation of METANET4U at the SEPLN, September, 6, 2012

 

METANET4U project was presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (SEPLN), last September, 6, 2012.

 

 

UPF and UPC delivered the presentation of METANET4U Project: Aumentar la Infraestructura Lingüística Europea (Increase European Linguistic Infrastructure).

The presentation raised considerable interest among researchers and industrials participating at this meeting that joins together all Language Technology stakeholders in Spain.

 

 

For more information about the SEPLN 2012 and its activities visit the official site

 

Jump to the top

 

 

Contribution to META-FORUM 2012 - A Strategy for Multilingual Europe

 

The METANET4U project contributed to the META-FORUM 2012. This event took place in Brussels, Belgium, June 21-22 2012, and gathered over 200 participants from research, industry and society. It represented a major step in the discussion and definition of a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020.

 

 

For more information about the META-FORUM 2012 and its activities visit the official site

 

Jump to the top

 

Results presented at the LREC2012 conference

 

The 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), one of the largest conferences in the area of Natural Language Processing took place between the 21th and the 27th in Istanbul, Turkey.

METANET4U was represented at this conference with over 20 papers, workshops and tutorials.

 

 

The complete program and participant lists are available at the LREC 2012 official site.

 

Jump to the top

 

Booth at EU Village Exhibiton, collocated with LREC 2012

 

The METANET4U project disseminated its results with the support of its booth at the EU Village Exhibition, an international exhibition of products, services, projects and stake holders of language technology.

 

 

Jump to the top

 

Organizing the META-RESEARCH Workshop on Advanced Treebanking

 

In a joint initiative with the CESAR and the METANORD projects, the METANET4U project organized the META-RESEARCH Workshop on Advanced Treebanking at the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012).

 

 

This workshop brought together people working on the availability of treebanks − through their creation, their manual, semiautomatic or automatic annotation, evaluation, conversion between various content and format representations, combination of treebanks from different sources or different languages into a common format and style of annotation, and exploitation of treebanks in innovative R&D.

 

More information related to this workshop is available here.

 

Jump to the top

 

META-NET Network Meeting and General Assembly

 

On the weekend of the 21st and 22nd of October the META-NET Network Meeting and General Assembly took place in Berlin.
This meeting was attended by representatives of all the nodes of the META-NET Network of Excellence which consist in the four European projects, T4ME, CESAR, METANET4U and META-NORD.

The focus of this meeting was on the presentation of the current state of the different projects of the META-NET network as well as the drafting of the Strategic Research Agenda by the Technology Council.

 

 

Jump to the top

 

The METANET4U project supported the EUROLAN 2011 Summer School "Natural Language Processing goes Industrial"

 

The 10th edition of the EUROLAN Summer School was organized under the title "Natural Language goes Industrial". It took place between the 28th of August and the 3rd of September at the University Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

 

eurolan

 

In the context of the changes in business management due to new communication technologies, the EUROLAN 2011 summer school has provided one week of intensive study of the natural language processing technologies currently under development to support industrial applications. Internationally known scholars, researchers (with the particular involvement of scientists from the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance – META), but also industrials involved in leading-edge work in innovative areas of natural language processing gave lectures at the school (tutorials, hands-on labs and demos) to share with students in-depth understanding and experience.

This edition of the EUROLAN Summer School was sponsored by the METANET4U project.
It was co-organized by António Branco, Dan Cristea and Dan Tufiș from the METANET4U project. António Branco delivered the course "Language Technology and Business Models".

 

Jump to the top

 

Celebrating the European Day of Languages, 2011

 

The 26th of September of 2011 was the 10th European Day of Languages (EDL) celebrated by the Council of Europe and throughout its 47 member states.

The European Day of Languages aims to raise awareness of:

  • Europe's rich linguistic diversity, which must be preserved and enhanced.
  • The need to diversify the range of languages people learn (including less widely used languages), which results in plurilingualism.
  • The need for people to develop some degree of proficiency in two languages or more to be able to play their full part in democratic citizenship in Europe.

The METANET4U project members capitalized on this event to raise awareness for the language technology field through press releases and other publications and initiatives.

 

Jump to the top

 

Contributing to the META-FORUM 2011 - Solutions for Multilingual Europe

 

The META-FORUM 2011 took place in Budapest, Hungary, between the 27th and the 28th of June. The conference brought together representatives of top-notch European research centres small and large technology corporations translation services and other users of language technology language communities and policy makers responsible for supporting research and innovation.

 

"

 

For more information about the META-FORUM 2011 please visit the event official site site.

 

Jump to the top

 

METANET4U representation at the APDC's ICT Fair

 

The METANET4U project was represented at the Associação Portuguesa para o Desenvolvimento das Comunicações (APDC) ICT fair, in Lisbon, and presented the META-NET project and the META-SHARE, the forthcoming platform to distribute language resources and tools, aimed at boosting the emergence of innovative solutions based on language technology. It counted on the visit of the Prime-Minister of Portugal on the inaugural day.

 

 

Jump to the top

 

Dissemination at the conference on Crosslingual Language Technology

 

METANET4U was represented at the Crosslingual Language Technology conference in Hamburg, where António Branco delivered an invited talk with the title Language Technology for Portuguese: Progress and Prospects, also Mike Rosner and Jan Joachimsen delivered an invited talk on Maltese Mixed Language and Multilingual Technology.

 

 

Jump to the top

 

Colloquium on the Portuguese Language on the Internet and the Digital World

 

António Branco delivered an invited talk on The Portuguese Language in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities for Language Science and Technology at the "Colloquium on the Portuguese Language on the Internet and in the Digital World", organized by the International Institute of the Portuguese Language (IILP), which took place between the 23th and the 26th of April at Guaramiranga, Brazil.

 

 

Jump to the top

 

METANET4U represented at the Symposium on Multilingualism and Cyberspace

 

António Branco represented the METANET4U project on the 2nd International Symposium on Multilingualism and Cyberspace and delivered an invited talk on META-NET, which took place at Brasília, Brazil, between the 7th and the 9th of November, 2011.

 

Jump to the top

 

Document Actions

METANET4U