META-FORUM 2010

Challenges for Multilingual Europe

November 17/18 2010

Hotel Le Plaza, Brussels, Belgium

 

November 17

 

Opening session

Algirdas Saudargas, Member of European Parliament: Welcome address

Roberto Cencioni (EC, Luxembourg): Greeting address

Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI, Germany): META-NET and META-FORUM: an overview [PDF of PPT]

 

Invited keynote speech

Chair: Jan Odijk (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

Yota Georgakopoulou (European Captioning Institute, UK): Challenges for the audiovisual industry in the digital age: accessibility and multilingualism [PDF]

 

Interactive session: From shared visions to a strategic research agenda

Chair: Josef van Genabith (DCU and CNGL, Ireland): Preliminary findings of the vision groups [PDF of PPT]

Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI, Germany): Introduction [PDF of PPT]

Phillippe Wacker (EMF, UK): Preliminary findings of the vision group “Media and information services” [PDF of PPT]

Alex Waibel (Carnegie-Mellon University, USA; University of Karlsruhe, Germany): Preliminary findings of the vision group “Interactive systems” [PDF of PPT]

Jörg Porsiel (Volkswagen AG, Germany): Preliminary findings of the vision group “Translation and localisation” [PDF of PPT]

Panel discussion: From Vision Group meetings and online discussions to a Strategic Research Agenda.

            Participants: Philippe Wacker, Alex Waibel, Jörg Porsiel, Joseph Mariani (LIMSI/CNRS, France), Josef van Genabith, Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, Greece)

 

Session: Language Technology in Europe and Upcoming Funding Opportunities

Invited Keynote Speech

Chair: Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany)

Georg Artelsmair (European Patent Office, Germany): Recent developments in machine translation policy at the European Patent Office [PDF of PPT]

Roberto Cencioni (European Commission, Luxembourg): EC Info-session on upcoming calls and further actions in support of language technology and innovation [PDF of PPT]

 

Session: Towards Collaboration and Cooperation in Research and Sharing of Language Resources on a European Scale

Chair: Nicoletta Calzolari (CNR, Italy)

Jan Hajic (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic): Building bridges using innovative approaches in machine translation [PDF of PPT]

Stelios Piperides (ILSP, Greece): META-SHARE: the open resource exchange facility [PDF of PPT]

 

Invited Keynote Speech

Chair: Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI, Germany)

Bill Dolan (Microsoft Research, USA): Building partnerships with language communities: the importance of shared technology and shared data [PDF of PPT]

 

META-NET Village: booths, posters and demos from all areas of META-NET

Chair: Bernardo Magnini (FBK, Italy)

            META-SHARE demo – the open resource exchange facility designed and built by META-NET

            The META-NET virtual information centre

            Machine translation demos built by the META-NET line of action “Building bridges to neighbouring technology fields”

            Poster presentations by the following EU-funded projects: ACCURAT, CLARIN, FLaReNet, Let’s MT, MOLTO, Monnet, MultilingualWeb, PANACEA, PROMISE, TTC

 

November 18

 

Session: Language Technology in Practice: Needs – Problems – Wishes

Chair: Toni Badia (Barcelona Media, Spain)

“Language technology companies and their expectations towards research organisations and funding agencies”

Introduction – Hanna Klimek (EC, Luxembourg): Towards a business forum for language-technology stakeholders [PDF of PPT]

Short statements by representatives from companies that use or build language technologies:

            Andrés Domínguez (Crossminder, Belgium)

            Moshe Wasseblat (NICE Systems, Israel)

            Paul Heisterkamp (Daimler AG, Germany)

            Anita Sempels (Wordbee SA, Luxembourg)

            Pavlos Koulouris (Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece)

            Judith Sastre (Inbenta, Spain)

            Anita Pincas (Univ. of London; Simplicity Computers Ltd., UK)

Wrapping up – Jochen Hummel (ESTeam GmbH, Germany): Introducing the Language Technology Business Association [PDF of PPT]

 

John Hendrik Weitzmann (Creative Commons Initiative, Germany) and Prodromos Tsiavos (Creative Commons Initiative, Greece, UK, Norway): Language resources and legal issues: problems and solutions for basic and industrial research [PDF of PPT]

 

Invited Keynote Speech

Chair: Khalid Choukri (ELDA/ELRA, France)

Swaran Lata (Department of Information Technology, Government of India, New Delhi, India): Indian multilingual initiatives – a holistic perspective [PDF of PPT]

 

Closing Session

Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI, Germany): Founding META: towards a joint action