European Language Equality -- Report on the Dutch Language
Creators: name: Steurs, Frieda
name: Vandeghinste, Vincent
name: Daelemans, Walter
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022

description: This report provides a new state of affairs with regard to language technology for Dutch, a language with approx. 25 million speakers. Language technology for Dutch is highly developed and the importance and status of Dutch is confirmed by other measurements, such as the number of online sales, which is growing strongly, and so is the presence of Dutch online.The Netherlands and Flanders have a strong research community in speech and language technology, which means that a lot of digital data is available for Dutch, such as databases for spoken and written language, associated software for the analysis and processing of language data, etc. Many of these language materials are freely accessible to researchers (via CLARIN), and often also to everyone via the Dutch Language Institute (INT). Companies can therefore easily include Dutch as one of the available languages, when developing new digital applications. Internationally, the Dutch language is well represented in the major European networks, such as CLARIN, ELRC, ELG, ELE and ELRA.A lot of language data is available, including via https://taalmaterialen.ivdnt.org. We note a number of important corpora such as the SoNaR reference corpus, the Dutch Parallel Corpus (DPC) and the Corpus Spoken Dutch (CGN). There is an urgent need for updated versions of these corpora with more, more recent and diversified language data. There is also a need for new corpora with, for example, the language of social media. In terms of lexical data, the INT is currently developing a computational lexicon for Dutch from the sixth century to contemporary Dutch with two major parts: a historical and a modern lexicon. We also mention Open Dutch Wordnet (ODWN), a semantic database with limited content. A new and more extensive version of this is also desirable. There are many software applications available for text and speech analysis and processing for Dutch. In translation technology, too, Dutch is well represented in the most well-known translation software packages, both for computer-aided translation and for machine translation.In order to keep up with the latest developments in the field of digital language infrastructure, various organisations and working groups are active in Belgium and the Netherlands. We mention the Dutch AI coalition and the NL Speech coalition where (computational) linguists and other experts meet to discuss the latest trends in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The Dutch NOTaS foundation represents research institutions and application developers in the Language and Speech Technology sector. A network of computational linguists and researchers is formed by CLIN (Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands) and organises conferences alternately in Belgium and the Netherlands. Other consultation platforms in Belgium include Belgium NLP meetup, which brings researchers and companies together around NLP, and Flanders AI, the research program for AI in Flanders.Many of the tools and materials mentioned were developed in the STEVIN research program (2004-2011) in which the Netherlands (NWO) and Flanders (FWO) joined forces. The need for a new joint research program is great. Through joint projects, Flanders and the Netherlands can act more vigorously and tap into new lines of research.