The Slovene Language in the Digital Age — Executive Summary
During the last 60 years, Europe has become a distinct political and economic structure. Culturally and linguistically it is rich and diverse. However, from Portuguese to Polish and Italian to Icelandic, everyday communication between Europe’s citizens, within business and among politicians is inevitably confronted with language barriers. The EU’s institutions spend about a billion euros a year on maintaining their policy of multilingualism, i.e., translating texts and interpreting spoken communication. Does this have to be such a burden? Language technology and linguistic research can make a significant contribution to removing the linguistic borders. Combined with intelligent devices and applications, language technology will help Europeans talk and do business together even if they do not speak a common language.
In 2011, total export to EU countires amounted to 71.9% in Slovene economy. In Germany as the largest European economy, trade within the EU accounted for 60.3% of its exports in 2010, and with other European countries totalled another 10.8%. But language barriers can bring business to a halt, especially for SMEs who do not have the financial means to reverse the situation. The only (unthinkable) alternative to this kind of a multilingual Europe would be to allow a single language to take a dominant position, to replace all other languages.
One way to overcome the language barrier is to learn foreign languages. Yet without technological support, mastering the 23 official languages of the member states of the European Union and some 60 other European languages is an insurmountable obstacle for Europe’s citizens, economy, political debate, and scientific progress.
The solution is to build key enabling technologies: language technologies will offer European stakeholders tremendous advantages, not only within the common European market, but also in trade relations with non-European countries, especially emerging economies. Language technology solutions will eventually serve as a unique bridge between Europe’s languages. An indespensable prerequisite for their development is first to carry out a systematic analysis of the linguistic particularities of all European languages, and the current state of language technology support for them.
The automated translation and speech processing tools currently available on the market fall short of the envisaged goals. The dominant actors in the field are primarily privately-owned for-profit enterprises based in Northern America. As early as the late 1970s, the EU realised the profound relevance of language technology as a driver of European unity, and began funding its first research projects, such as EUROTRA. At the same time, national projects were set up that generated valuable results, but never led to a concerted European effort. In contrast to these highly selective funding efforts, other multilingual societies such as India (22 official languages) and South Africa (11 official languages) have set up long-term national programmes for language research and technology development.
The predominant actors in LT today rely on imprecise statistical approaches that do not make use of deeper linguistic methods and knowledge. For example, sentences are often automatically translated by comparing each new sentence against thousands of sentences previously translated by humans. The quality of the output largely depends on the size and quality of the available data. While the automatic translation of simple sentences in languages with sufficient amounts of available textual data can achieve useful results, shallow statistical methods are doomed to fail in the case of languages with a much smaller body of sample data or in the case of sentences with complex, non-repetitive structures. Analysing the deeper structural properties of languages is the only way forward if we want to build applications that perform well across the entire range of European languages.
The European Union is thus funding projects such as EuroMatrix and EuroMatrixPlus (since 2006) and iTranslate4 (since 2010), which carry out basic and applied research, and generate resources for establishing high quality language technology solutions for all European languages. Drawing on the insights gained so far, today’s hybrid language technology mixing deep processing with statistical methods should be able to bridge the gap between all European languages and beyond. But as this series of white papers shows, there is a dramatic difference between Europe’s member states in terms of both the maturity of the research and in the state of readiness with respect to language solutions.
After scrupulous examination and comparison with other languages we can establish that the state of language technologies and resources for Slovene is far from satisfactory, mainly for two reasons. The first reason is rather obvious and stems from the number of speakers of Slovene, which at a little more than 2 million cannot sustain the development of technologies and resources exclusively in commercial environment. On the other hand, Slovene government or institutions designated to take care of the needs of the Slovene speaking community did not succeed in establishing a relevant institutional framework in the last decade, where a systematic and carefully planned development of language specific technologies and resources would take place. Without such an institutional background we cannot expect Slovene to maintain its equal status in the future digital environment. This situation is further complicated by the fact that the study of natural language processing for Slovene is lacking in the academic environment, which represents a long-term problem. To ensure the expected quality of language technologies and resources for Slovene in the future it is therefore imperative that an appropriate programme of their development is designed and institutional framework is established for its implementation.
META-NET’s vision is high-quality language technology for all languages that supports political and economic unity through cultural diversity. This technology will help tear down existing barriers and build bridges between Europe’s languages. This requires all stakeholders – in politics, research, business, and society – to unite their efforts for the future.
This white paper series complements the other strategic actions taken by META-NET (see the appendix for an overview). Up-to-date information such as the current version of the META-NET vision paper or the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) can be found on the META-NET web site: http://www.meta-net.eu.
