European Language Grid: Introduction

Abstract

Europe is a multilingual society with 24 European Union Member State languages and dozens of additional languages including regional and minority languages as well as languages spoken by immigrants, trade partners and tourists. While languages are an essential part of our cultural heritage, language barriers continue to be unbreachable in many situations. The only option to enable and to benefit from multilingualism is through Language Technologies (LTs) including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Speech Technologies. The commercial European LT landscape is dominated by hundreds of SMEs that develop many different kinds of LTs. While the industrial and also the academic European LT community is world-class, it is also massively fragmented. This chapter is an introduction to the present volume, which describes the European Language Grid (ELG) cloud platform, initiative and EU project. The ELG system is targeted to evolve into the primary platform and marketplace for LT in Europe by providing one umbrella platform for the entire European LT community, including research and industry, enabling all stakeholders to showcase, share and distribute their services, tools, products, datasets and other resources. At the time of writing, the ELG platform provides access to more than 13,000 commercial and non-commercial language resources and technologies covering all official EU languages and many national, co-official, regional and minority languages.