Digital Language Equality: Definition, Metric, Dashboard

Gaspari, Federico; Grützner-Zahn, Annika; Rehm, Georg; Gallagher, Owen; Giagkou, Maria; Piperidis, Stelios; Way, Andy

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-28819-7_3

“…For example, dialogue systems allow us to communicate with machines in our own language; automatic translation increases access to content in different languages, thus facilitating multilingualism; and text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems broaden access to technology for different user profiles. All of this would help to guarantee digital inclusion and language equality at a time when a significant number of European languages are in danger of digital extinction (Gaspari et al, 2021(Gaspari et al, , 2022.…”

Section: Tecnologies Del Llenguatge Per a Una Administració Pública M...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Language technologies for a multilingual public administration in Spain

Flores¹,

Campos²,

Vladu³

et al. 2023

RLD

0

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Interactions between citizens and the public administration are increasingly taking place by electronic means, often referred to as e-government. In Spain, these interactions mostly have to be monolingual, in Spanish, in the case of the central administration, but may be bilingual or even multilingual in autonomous communities that have their own official language. In this paper, we intend to show how state-of-the-art oral and written linguistic technologies for Spain’s coofficial languages could allow speakers of these languages to use them in many of their administrative relations with any Spanish public agency, thereby facilitating the conversion of Spain’s mostly monolingual administration into a multilingual one, enhancing digital language equality and guaranteeing the linguistic rights of speakers of minoritised languages. We will present an overview of the most promising language technologies in terms of their relevance from the point of view of multilingual communication between citizens and the administration. We will also review the existing technologies for Spain’s co-official languages, and present some ideas on how these could be integrated towards the multilingual transformation of Spanish public administrations without neglecting some of the attendant ethical and legal issues. The present work is intended to serve as an introductory and accessible overview for legislators, administrators, or any other person interested in the potential of language technologies to assist in developing a multilingual public administration.

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“…Indeed, the findings of the European Language Equality project (https://europeanlanguage-equality.eu/, accessed on 14 December 2022) over the past two years demonstrate a very sorry state of affairs: despite the obvious improvements in language technology since the implementation of methods based on neural networks, language barriers still hamper cross-lingual communication and the free flow of knowledge across borders, and many languages are endangered or on the edge of extinction [2,3]. On a global scale, the situation is far worse, of course, especially for languages that do not have a written tradition [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Neural Machine Translation Systems for Multilingual Participatory Spaces

Lohar

¹

,

Xie

²

,

Gallagher

³

et al. 2023

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This work presents the development of the translation component in a multistage, multilevel, multimode, multilingual and dynamic deliberative (M4D2) system, built to facilitate automated moderation and translation in the languages of five European countries: Italy, Ireland, Germany, France and Poland. Two main topics were to be addressed in the deliberation process: (i) the environment and climate change; and (ii) the economy and inequality. In this work, we describe the development of neural machine translation (NMT) models for these domains for six European languages: Italian, English (included as the second official language of Ireland), Irish, German, French and Polish. As a result, we generate 30 NMT models, initially baseline systems built using freely available online data, which are then adapted to the domains of interest in the project by (i) filtering the corpora, (ii) tuning the systems with automatically extracted in-domain development datasets and (iii) using corpus concatenation techniques to expand the amount of data available. We compare our results produced by the domain-adapted systems with those produced by Google Translate, and demonstrate that fast, high-quality systems can be produced that facilitate multilingual deliberation in a secure environment.

show abstract

Language technologies for a multilingual public administration in Spain

Flores¹,

Campos²,

Vladu³

et al. 2023

RLD

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Interactions between citizens and the public administration are increasingly taking place by electronic means, often referred to as e-government. In Spain, these interactions mostly have to be monolingual, in Spanish, in the case of the central administration, but may be bilingual or even multilingual in autonomous communities that have their own official language. In this paper, we intend to show how state-of-the-art oral and written linguistic technologies for Spain’s coofficial languages could allow speakers of these languages to use them in many of their administrative relations with any Spanish public agency, thereby facilitating the conversion of Spain’s mostly monolingual administration into a multilingual one, enhancing digital language equality and guaranteeing the linguistic rights of speakers of minoritised languages. We will present an overview of the most promising language technologies in terms of their relevance from the point of view of multilingual communication between citizens and the administration. We will also review the existing technologies for Spain’s co-official languages, and present some ideas on how these could be integrated towards the multilingual transformation of Spanish public administrations without neglecting some of the attendant ethical and legal issues. The present work is intended to serve as an introductory and accessible overview for legislators, administrators, or any other person interested in the potential of language technologies to assist in developing a multilingual public administration.

show abstract

Digital Language Equality: Definition, Metric, Dashboard

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Language technologies for a multilingual public administration in Spain

Language technologies for a multilingual public administration in Spain

Building Neural Machine Translation Systems for Multilingual Participatory Spaces

Language technologies for a multilingual public administration in Spain

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