This volume of the series “Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing” includes most of the papers presented at the Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe”, held at the University of Hamburg on September 27, 2011 in the framework of the conference GSCL 2011 with the topic “Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications”, along with several additional contributions. In addition to an overview article on Machine Translation and two contributions on the European initiatives META-NET and Multilingual Web, the volume includes six full research articles. Our intention with this workshop was to bring together various groups concerned with the umbrella topics of multilingualism and language technology, especially multilingual technologies. This encompassed, on the one hand, representatives from research and development in the field of language technologies, and, on the other hand, users from diverse areas such as, among others, industry, administration and funding agencies. The Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe” was co-organised by the two GSCL working groups “Text Technology” and “Machine Translation” (http://gscl.info) as well as by META-NET (http://www.meta-net.eu).

This white paper is part of a series that promotes knowledge about language technology and its potential. It addresses educators, journalists, politicians, language communities and others. The availability and use of language technology in Europe varies between languages. Consequently, the actions that are required to further support research and development of language technologies also differ for each language. The required actions depend on many factors, such as the complexity of a given language and the size of its community. META-NET, a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission, has conducted an analysis of current language resources and technologies. This analysis focused on the 23 official European languages as well as other important national and regional languages in Europe. The results of this analysis suggest that there are many significant research gaps for each language. A more detailed expert analysis and assessment of the current situation will help maximise the impact of additional research and minimize any risks. META-NET consists of 54 research centres from 33 countries that are working with stakeholders from commercial businesses, government agencies, industry, research organisations, software companies, technology providers and European universities. Together, they are creating a common technology vision while developing a strategic research agenda that shows how language technology applications can address any research gaps by 2020.

This book offers an inclusive perspective on the constellation of languages in Europe by taking into account official state languages, regional minority languages and immigrant minority languages. Although "celebrating linguistic diversity" is one of the key propositions in the European discourse on multilingualism and language policies, this device holds for these three types of languages in a decreasing order. All three types of languages, however, are constituent parts of a multilingual European identity and should be taken into account in any type of language policy. Both facts and policies on multilingualism and plurilingual education are addressed in case studies at the national and European level. The selection of case studies is based on a careful weighing of geographical spread of countries and languages across Europe on the one hand, and availability of established expert knowledge on the other. After an Introduction to the theme of the book (Guus Extra and Durk Gorter), Part I deals with official state languages with a focus on the spread of English as lingua franca across Europe (Juliane House), on French and France (Dennis Ager), on Polish in Poland and abroad (Justyna Lesniewśka), and on language constellations in the Baltic States (Gabrielle Hogan-Brun). Part II deals with regional minority languages with a focus on Catalan in Spain (Francesc Xavier Vila i Moreno), Frisian in the Netherlands (Durk Gorter et al.), Hungarian as a minority language in Central Europe (Susan Gal), and Saami in the Nordic countries (Mikael Svonni). Part III deals with immigrant minority languages in the United Kingdom (Viv Edwards), Sweden (Lilian Nygren-Junkin), Italy (Monica Barni and Carla Bagna) and Europe at large (Guus Extra and Kutlay Yağmur).

Tanja Schultz and Katrin Kirchhoff have compiled a comprehensive overview of speech processing from a multilingual perspective. By taking this all-inclusive approach to speech processing, the editors have included theories, algorithms, and techniques that are required to support spoken input and output in a large variety of languages. Multilingual Speech Processing presents a comprehensive introduction to research problems and solutions, both from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective, and highlights technology that incorporates the increasing necessity for multilingual applications in our global community. Current challenges of speech processing and the feasibility of sharing data and system components across different languages guide contributors in their discussions of trends, prognoses and open research issues. This includes automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis, but also speech-to-speech translation, dialog systems, automatic language identification, and handling non-native speech. The book is complemented by an overview of multilingual resources, important research trends, and actual speech processing systems that are being deployed in multilingual human-human and human-machine interfaces. Researchers and developers in industry and academia with different backgrounds but a common interest in multilingual speech processing will find an excellent overview of research problems and solutions detailed from theoretical and practical perspectives. - State-of-the-art research with a global perspective by authors from the USA, Asia, Europe, and South Africa - The only comprehensive introduction to multilingual speech processing currently available - Detailed presentation of technological advances integral to security, financial, cellular and commercial applications

Includes chapters that provide a survey of approaches to developing multimedia software and relevant multilingual issues; design considerations for a visual language and how it might be developed for maximum ease of use.

In everyday communication, Europe’s citizens, business partners and politicians are inevitably confronted with language barriers. Language technology has the potential to overcome these barriers and to provide innovative interfaces to technologies and knowledge. This document presents a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020. The agenda was prepared by META-NET, a European Network of Excellence. META-NET consists of 60 research centres in 34 countries, who cooperate with stakeholders from economy, government agencies, research organisations, non-governmental organisations, language communities and European universities. META-NET’s vision is high-quality language technology for all European languages. “The research carried out in the area of language technology is of utmost importance for the consolidation of Portuguese as a language of global communication in the information society.” — Dr. Pedro Passos Coelho (Prime-Minister of Portugal) “It is imperative that language technologies for Slovene are developed systematically if we want Slovene to flourish also in the future digital world.” — Dr. Danilo Türk (President of the Republic of Slovenia) “For such small languages like Latvian keeping up with the ever increasing pace of time and technological development is crucial. The only way to ensure future existence of our language is to provide its users with equal opportunities as the users of larger languages enjoy. Therefore being on the forefront of modern technologies is our opportunity.” — Valdis Dombrovskis (Prime Minister of Latvia) “Europe’s inherent multilingualism and our scientific expertise are the perfect prerequisites for significantly advancing the challenge that language technology poses. META-NET opens up new opportunities for the development of ubiquitous multilingual technologies.” — Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan (German Minister of Education and Research)

Human language technologies continue to play an important part in the modern information society. This book contains papers presented at the fifth international conference ‘Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2012)’, held in Tartu, Estonia, in October 2012. Baltic HLT provides a special venue for new and ongoing work in computational linguistics and related disciplines, both in the Baltic states and in a broader geographical perspective. It brings together scientists, developers, providers and users of HLT, and is a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing, promoting cooperation between the research communities of computer science and linguistics from the Baltic countries and the rest of the world. Twenty long papers, as well as the posters or demos accepted for presentation at the conference, are published here. They cover a wide range of topics: morphological disambiguation, dependency syntax and valency, computational semantics, named entities, dialogue modeling, terminology extraction and management, machine translation, corpus and parallel corpus compiling, speech modeling and multimodal communication. Some of the papers also give a general overview of the state of the art of human language technology and language resources in the Baltic states. This book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the use and application of computational linguistics and related disciplines.