Strategic Research, Innovation and Implementation Agenda for Digital Language Equality in Europe by 2030

Abstract

This chapter presents the ELE Programme (ELE Consortium 2022). Reacting to the landmark resolution (European Parliament 2018), its vision is to achieve digital language equality in Europe by 2030. The programme was prepared jointly with many stakeholders from the European Language Technology, Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and language-centric AI communities, as well as with representatives of relevant initiatives and associations, and language communities. Europe still suffers from strong inequalities in terms of technology support of its languages. English is still by far the language with the best technological support, followed by a cluster of three languages (German, Spanish, French) that already have only half the technological support of English. More than half of the around 90 languages surveyed have either weak or no technological support at all. The ELE Programme is foreseen to be a shared, long-term funding programme tailored to Europe’s needs, demands and values. For the EU we foresee the role of providing resources for coordinating the programme, for providing shared infrastructures, for maintaining the scientific goals and programme principles, etc. The participating countries have the role of providing resources for the development of technologies and datasets for their own languages. Key goals are to reduce the technology gap between English and all other European languages and to address the lack of available language data. The ELE Programme tackles the following overarching themes: Language Modelling, Data and Knowledge, Machine Translation, Text Understanding and Speech. These interconnected themes focus upon the socio-political goal of establishing DLE in Europe and on the scientific goal of Deep Natural Language Understanding, both by 2030.1