E uropean Language Grid: A Joint Platform for the E uropean Language Technology Community (2021)

Abstract: Europe is a multilingual society, in which dozens of languages are spoken. The only option to enable and to benefit from multilingualism is through Language Technologies (LT), i.e., Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies. We describe the European Language Grid (ELG), which is targeted to evolve into the primary platform and marketplace for LT in Europe by providing one umbrella platform for the European LT landscape, including research and industry, enabling all stakeholders to upload, share and distribute their services, products and resources. At the end of our EU project, which will establish a legal entity in 2022, the ELG will provide access to approx. 1300 services for all European languages as well as thousands of data sets.

## introduction europe is a multilingual society with 24 eu mem ber state languages and dozens of additional lan guages including regional and minority languages and languages spoken by immigrants, trade part ners and tourists. the only option to enable and to benefit from multilingualism is through lan guage technologies (lt) including natural lan guage processing (nlp) and speech technologies @xcite . while the european lt landscape is world class, it is also massively fragmented @xcite . we describe release 2 of the european lan guage grid (elg) cloud platform. 1 this scal able system is targeted to evolve into the primary 1 https://www.europeanlanguagegrid.eu . we provide a screencast demo video at https://youtu.be/ld6qadkkzim . platform for lt in europe. it will provide one umbrella platform for all lts developed by the european lt landscape, including research and industry, addressing a gap that has been repeat edly raised by the european lt community for many years @xcite . elg is meant to be a virtual home and marketplace for all products, services and organisations active in the lt space in europe @xcite . the platform can be used by all stakeholders to show case, share and distribute their products, services, tools and resources. at the end of the eu project elg (20192022), which will establish a legal en tity in early 2022, the platform will provide access to approx. 1300 commercial and noncommercial tools and services for all european languages, as well as thousands of language resources (lrs). elg will enable the european lt community to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets and to deploy them through the grid. the elg is also meant to support digital language equal ity in europe (stoa, 2017; european parliament, 2018), i. e., to create a situation in which all lan guages are supported through technologies equally well. the current imbalance is characterised by a stark predominance of lts for english, while al most all other languages are only marginally sup ported and, thus, in danger of digital language ex tinction (rehm and uszkoreit, @xcite . section 2 gives an overview of the elg plat form and related activities. section 3 touches upon related work. section 4 concludes the paper. ## the european language grid the european lt community has been demand ing a dedicated lt platform for years. elg con centrates on commercial and noncommercial lts, both functional (processing and generation, writ ten and spoken language) and nonfunctional (cor pora, data sets etc.). we want to establish the elg as the primary market place for the fragmented eu ropean lt landscape @xcite to con nect demand and supply. the elg is based on ro bust, scalable and reliable open source technolo gies, enabling it to scale with the growing demand and supply. it contains records of all resources, service and application types, languages as well as lt companies, research organisations, projects, etc. (see figure 1 and figure 4 in the appendix). ## related work elg builds upon previous work of the elg con sortium and the wider european lt community, es pecially metanet/meta and elrc. in addition, we have collected more than 30 plat forms, projects or initiatives that can be considered relevant for elg including, among others, uima @xcite , clarin @xcite , dkpro @xcite provide an exhaustive com parison. they share at least one of the following goals with elg, i. e., they provide: 1) a collec tion of lt/nlp tools or data sets; 2) a platform, which harvests metadata records from distributed sources, 3) a platform for the sharing of tools or data sets. while related projects do exist, the ap proach of elg is unique. the platform that most closely resembles elg is the national platform for lt, operated by the ministry of electronics and in formation technology in india. 16 several global technology enterprises offer lt services. among these are amazon compre hend 17 and microsoft azure cognitive services @xcite . furthermore, google recently (sept. 2018) released a search platform for data sets. 18 intento foot_16 offers commercial lt services from different providers for selected tasks. ## conclusions and future work it has been argued that europe should not out source its multilingual communication and lan guage infrastructure to other continents since the european demands are unique and complex @xcite . instead, europe should make use of and support its own lt community. one of the obsta cles to overcome is the creation of a joint technol ogy platform. the elg will foster lts for europe built in europe. in its first two years, the elg project has seen the demo of the mvp in october 2019, release 1 in early 2020 and two successfully completed open calls for pilot projects. we have been improving and extending the platform and continuously added services and data sets. while release 2 of the platform will follow in march 2021, release 3 is foreseen for early 2022.