FLaReNet Strategic Language Resource Agenda

Despite the complexity of handling its languages, the European Union has established that cultural and language differences are a unique asset to be preserved. Europe needs to find means - such as technological ones - to overcome the language barriers to support citizens and industry in a multilingual globalised world. The large majority of industrial technological applications that handle natural language, i.e. Machine Translation, Crosslingual Information Retrieval, Multilingual Information Extraction, Automatic Document Indexing, Question Answering, Natural Language Interfaces, etc., include Language Resources as critical components. Although Language Technologies may consist of language independent engines, they depend on the availability of language-dependent knowledge under the form of Language Resources for their real-life implementation. At the same time, it is proved that a critical mass of Language Resources can make advancement in research and technology development possible and quicker, making Europe the leader of the market related to multilingualism. Companies such as Google or Microsoft play a dominant role in this framework, as they have access to a huge amount of data in many different languages, devote considerable resources to Language Technologies, have massive computing power and a direct research-to-application pipeline using a new business model based on so-called "free" services. The fact that a US company like Google is delivering some of the most comprehensive Language Technology solutions to support multilingualism should raise concern among EU officials.