Georg Rehm. Language Technologies for Big Data – A Strategic Agenda for the Multilingual Digital Single Market. BDVA Summit (Big Data Value Association), Valencia, Spain, December 2016. December 1, 2016.

1. META-NET has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through the contract CRACKER
(grant agreement no.: 645357). Formerly co-funded by FP7 and ICT PSP through the contracts T4ME (grant agreement no.: 249119),
CESAR (grant agreement no.: 271022), METANET4U (grant agreement no.: 270893) and META-NORD (grant agreement no.: 270899).
Language Technologies for Big Data:
A Strategic Agenda for the
Multilingual Digital Single Market
Georg Rehm
Coordinator CRACKER, General Secretary META-NET
georg.rehm@dfki.de
BDVA Summit – Valencia, Spain, 1st December 2016

2. Language Technology
q Text and Content Analytics (NLP, Multimedia Processing)
§ Information Extraction, Relation Extraction, Knowledge Extraction
§ Mining of: Topics, Sentiments, Opinions, Arguments, Rumours etc.
§ Goal: From Data to Knowledge (Smart Data) – no deep NLU yet
q Semantic Technologies – Knowledge Technologies
§ Semantic Web, semantic descriptions, ontologies, reasoning
§ RDF, Linked Data, Knowledge Graphs, grounding
q Multilingual and Crosslingual Technologies (Machine Translation)
§ Technologies to bridge language barriers
q Text and Report Generation – From data to text
q Curation Technologies – mix of tech to create and curate content
q Conversational Interaction Technologies (ASR, DS, TTS etc.)
q Multilingual Europe – Technologies for all European languages
http://www.meta-net.eu 2

3. Outline
q Initiatives for Multilingual Europe
q Towards the Multilingual Digital Single Market
q MDSM SRIA V0.9
q Next Steps
http://www.meta-net.eu – http://www.cracker-project.eu 3

4. q
60 research centres in 34 countries (founded in 2010)
Chair of Executive Board: Jan Hajic (CUNI)
Dep.: J. van Genabith (DFKI), A. Vasiljevs (Tilde)
General Secretary: Georg Rehm (DFKI)
q
Multilingual Europe
Technology Alliance.
826 members in
67 countries
(published in 2013) (31 volumes; published in 2012)
T4ME (META-NET) CESAR METANET4UMETA-NORDMultilingual Europe Technology AllianceNET 4

5. 1 DFKI Germany Georg Rehm
2 CUNI Czech Republic Jan Hajic
3 ELDA France Khalid Choukri
4 FBK Italy Marcello Federico
5 ATHENA RC Greece Stelios Piperidis
6 UEDIN UK Philipp Koehn
7 USFD UK Lucia Specia
Coordination and Support Action, H2020-ICT17, 2015–2017, 36 months – http://www.cracker-project.eu
Cracking the Language Barrier
Coordination, Evaluation and Resources for European MT Research
THREE PRIORITY AREAS FOR ACHIEVINGTHE MULTILINGUAL DIGITAL SINGLE MARKET
Multilingual access to all digital goods and services across Europe1
Geo-blocking:
due to nationality, location, or residence
Language-blocking:
languages they do not speak
Geo-blocking and language-blocking are barriers to access
Customers are six times more likely to buy from sites in their native language.
Most EU languages address less than 3% of the market, fundamentally limiting SMEs operating in countries where those
languages are spoken.
Lack of language technology support (automatic translation, tools to assist human translators, and multilingual support in
European businesses.
Language can be expensive for SMEs
Online businesses face around €5,000 in up-front costs for each
new language they translate their websites into, plus similar
and marketing costs.
Even when sites are translated, the vast majority of
SMEs cannot respond to support requests or
customer feedback in other languages. Such
responsiveness is needed to achieve customer
satisfaction and build brand loyalty.
English is not the answer
52% of EU customers do not purchase
Adding even a few languages to an SME’s website beyond English
can have a major impact on revenue. Large organizations today
to increase market share.
6x more
likely to
purchase
Site in buyer’s
native language
Site in foreign
language
Likelihoodofpurchasing
THREE PRIORITY AREAS FOR ACHIEVINGTHE MULTILINGUAL DIGITAL SINGLE MARKET
Multilingual access to all digital goods and services across Europe1
Geo-blocking:
due to nationality, location, or residence
customers
Language-blocking:
languages they do not speak
however, current online translation is insufficient
trying to conduct
common languages
Geo-blocking and language-blocking are barriers to access
Both geo-blocking and language-blocking are
daily problems for tens of millions of EU citizens.
Customers are six times more likely to buy from sites in their native language.
Most EU languages address less than 3% of the market, fundamentally limiting SMEs operating in countries where those
languages are spoken.
Lack of language technology support (automatic translation, tools to assist human translators, and multilingual support in
European businesses.
Language can be expensive for SMEs
Online businesses face around €5,000 in up-front costs for each
new language they translate their websites into, plus similar
and marketing costs.
Even when sites are translated, the vast majority of
SMEs cannot respond to support requests or
customer feedback in other languages. Such
responsiveness is needed to achieve customer
satisfaction and build brand loyalty.
English is not the answer
52% of EU customers do not purchase
Adding even a few languages to an SME’s website beyond English
can have a major impact on revenue. Large organizations today
to increase market share.
6x more
likely to
purchase
Site in buyer’s
native language
Site in foreign
language
Likelihoodofpurchasing
Communities
• META-NET incl. META-SHARE and META
• MT evaluation initiatives – WMT, IWSLT, MT Marathons
• MT and other LT industry
• Language resources – META-SHARE, ELRA
• HT/MT evaluation tools – translate5
• Translation industry, translation profession
• MT user communities
Strategic Agenda for the Multilingual Digital Single Market
• Version 0.5 presented at META-FORUM 2015 (Riga)
• Version 0.9 presented at META-FORUM 2016 (Lisbon)
Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
5

6. http://www.cracker-project.eu • http://www.meta-net.eu
• Riga Summit 2015 and Riga Declaration.
• Federation of European projects and
organisations working on technologies
for a multilingual Europe.
• Multi-lateral Memorandum of Understanding;
10 organisations and 24 projects on board.
• Getting new members on a regular basis.
• Selected areas of collaboration: data
management and repositories, tools,
shared tasks, evaluations, events.
• Goal: provide one umbrella organisation
for the whole community.

7. q Top priority in the European Union.
q Expected to add 400b€ to European GDP
and hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
q Unfortunately, the language topic is not
included in the EC’s Digital Single Market
strategy (published in May 2015).
7

10. http://www.meta-net.eu 10

11. Facts and Figures
http://www.meta-net.eu 11
THREE PRIORITY AREAS FOR ACHIEVINGTHE MULTILINGUAL DIGITAL SINGLE MARKET
Multilingual access to all digital goods and services across Europe1
Customers are six times more likely to buy from sites in their native language.
Most EU languages address less than 3% of the market, fundamentally limiting SMEs operating in countries where those
languages are spoken.
Language can be expensive for SMEs
Online businesses face around €5,000 in up-front costs for each
new language they translate their websites into, plus similar
Even when sites are translated, the vast majority of
SMEs cannot respond to support requests or
customer feedback in other languages. Such
English is not the answer
52% of EU customers do not purchase
Adding even a few languages to an SME’s website beyond English
can have a major impact on revenue. Large organizations today
to increase market share.
6x more
likely to
purchase
Site in buyer’s
native language
Site in foreign
language
Likelihoodofpurchasing

12. A. Ansip’s May 2016 Blog Post
q Posted on 27 May 2016.
q First public acknowledgment
of the EC that the language
topic is of very high relevance
for the Digital Single Market.
q “Overcoming language
barriers is vital for building the
DSM, which is by definition
multilingual. It is now time to
reduce and remove the
language barriers that are
holding back its advance, and
turn them into competitive
advantages.”
http://www.meta-net.eu – http://www.cracker-project.eu 12

13. 13

14. Language as a Data Type
q Language technology is a necessary ingredient of the multilingual
DSM and mandatory enabler for the European data economy.
q Big Data is never only numerical – there’s always a language
component: unstructured text content, column heads, metadata etc.
q Without language technology, Big Data analytics won’t happen.
q The EU Data Economy needs Multilingual Big Data Content
Analytics and Multilingual Big Data Content Generation.
http://www.meta-net.eu 14
Unstructured data
Language
Technology
Structured data
Heterogeneous data Homogeneous data
Big data Knowledge
Unorganised data Organised data
Multilingual big data Crosslingual analytics

15. q Overall goal: “deliver new Big
Data technology allowing for deep
analytics capacities on data-at-
rest and data-in-motion while
providing sufficient privacy
guarantees, optimized user
experience support and a sound
data engineering framework.”
q “In Europe, text-based data
resources occur in many different
languages […].”
q “This multilingualism of data
sources makes it often
impossible to use existing tools
and to align available resources,
because they are generally
provided only in the English
language.”
q “Thus, the seamless aligning of
data sources for data analysis or
business intelligence applications
is hindered by the lack of
language support and availability
of appropriate resources.” (p. 23)
http://www.meta-net.eu 15

16. BDVA SRIA V2.0: Challenges and Needs
q BDVA SRIA Technical Priority “Data Management”:
§ Tools for handling unstructured and semi-structured data for different languages.
§ Annotation frameworks for integration of annotation technologies and data formats.
§ Techniques for semantic interoperability such as standardised data models and
interoperable architectures for different sectors.
§ Standards and multilingual knowledge repositories that allow the seamless linking of data.
q BDVA SRIA Technical Priority “Data Analytics”:
§ Improved, more accurate statistical models, especially with regard to semantic analysis.
§ Deep learning, contextualisation, machine learning, NLP, smart data analytics and real-
time semantic analysis, including event and pattern discovery.
§ Methods for unstructured multimedia analytics and data mining, linking
algorithms to deliver cross-domain and cross-sector intelligence.
q BDVA SRIA Technical Priority “Data Processing”:
§ Real-time analytics and event processing of highly heterogeneous
data sources and formats
§ Processing, linking, aligning data sets with one another, including
semantic representations, unstructured, semi-structured and
structured data, and multimedia data etc.
§ Knowledge extraction out of heterogeneous data sets.
§ Special emphasis on quality, precision, robustness
http://www.meta-net.eu 16

17. MDSM SRIA
q Version 0.5 unveiled at META-FORUM 2015
q Version 0.9 unveiled at META-FORUM 2016
q Version 1.0 foreseen for early 2017
q Prepared and presented by Cracking the Language
Barrier federation (editorial team: 13 colleagues)
q SRIA addresses how the LT community is going
to act united in order to make the DSM multilingual
q Aligned to three of the BDVA SRIA V2.0’s technical priorities:
Data Management, Data Analysis, Data Processing.
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Strategic Agenda for the
Multilingual Digital Single Market
Technologies for Overcoming Language Barriers towards
a truly integrated European Online Market
D
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Version 0.5 – April 22, 2015
http://www.meta-net.eu – http://www.cracker-project.eu 17

18. Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
http://www.cracker-project.eu
http://www.cracking-the-language-barrier.eu

19. MLV Programme
q Multilingual Value Programe*
§ Three-year programme
§ Requires modest investment
q “Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single
Market through technologies for
translating, analysing, processing and
curating natural language content”
q Three components address the main
needs of the Multilingual DSM (MDSM)
and how to put them into practice:
1. Multilingual Application Areas
2. Multilingual Services
3. Research
http://www.meta-net.eu – http://www.cracker-project.eu 19
Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
* SRIA V0.9 and MLV Programme devised
before re-organisation of DG CONNECT.

20. Multilingual Digital Single Market
Automated Translation
E-Commerce
Content, Media,
Verticals
Translation, Language,
Knowledge, Data
Knowledge and
Data Repositories
Multilingual Applications
Multilingual Services
Research
Crosslingual Big
Data Language
Analytics
Meaning,
Semantics,
Knowledge
High-Quality
Machine
Translation
SMEs CEF DSIs IT Integrators Research
provide innovative
applications
fills gaps
H2020 RIAs
H2020 CSAs, IAs, RIAs
H2020 CSAs, RAs, national funding
Multimodal Interaction
Language Processing, Analysis and Production – Language Resources
Citizens Public Business
interoperable and standardised
collaboration with member states
Conversational
Technologies
Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Language as a Data Type and
Key Challenge for Big Data
Enabling the Multilingual Digital Single Market
through technologies for translating, analysing, processing
and curating natural language content
SRIA Editorial Team
Version 0.9 – July 2016
MLV Programme

21. MDSM: Goals and Needs
q Crosslingual communication for SMEs, public institutions, citizens
q Crosslingual SME presales communication and aftersales services
q Multilingual (big) data, language and knowledge value chains
q Multilingual websites, product catalogues, product descriptions
q Multilingual knowledge bases and knowledge graphs (and services)
q Multilingual conversational interfaces for connected devices (IoT)
q Crosslingual business intelligence (e.g., based on UGC)
q Crosslingual social media analytics for EU-wide societal issues
q Multilingual text and report generation (knowledge/data to text)
q All services must be domain-adaptable (no one size fits all)
q Translation Centre (Cloud) – HQ automated translation for all
http://www.meta-net.eu – http://www.cracker-project.eu 21

22. Application Areas (Selection)
q Multilingual E-commerce
§ Customer-facing vs. back-office facing (after-market, after-sales)
§ Crosslingual search, CRM, helpdesks, processes, workflows
§ Semantic, crosslingual product descriptions and catalogues
§ Online dispute resolution
q Multilingual Content, Media, Verticals
§ Content analytics, curation, generation (incl. authoring support)
§ Multimodal communication (conversational, written, IoT)
§ Vertical domains: health, government, mobility, energy, legal.
q Translation, Language, Knowledge, Data
§ Translation Cloud – written/spoken, automatic/human
§ Crosslingual public and social intelligence, business intelligence
§ HQ resources, under-resourced languages, domain-specific LRs
22

23. Three Phases: 2018–2020
q Pre-MLV (2016/2017): stakeholder discussions and consensus building; finalisation of
strategy and roadmap; selection and prioritisation of topics; small prototype projects for
proofs of concept; CSAs for planning, coordination, support, community building.
q MLV Phase 1 (2018): first Multilingual Services; conceptualise
Multilingual Applications; integration of services into applications; start
and continue activities in the priority research themes
q MLV Phase 2 (2019): extension of Multilingual Services (coverage,
quality, precision); standardisation activities; deployment of first
applications; business models; continue research activities
q MLV Phase 3 (2020): extension of Multilingual Services (incl.
standardisation); deployment of Multilingual Applications;
transformation of projects into sustainable entities; continue research
q Post-MLV (2021+): Scaling up and extending Multilingual Applications and Multilingual
Services; expanding language and domain coverage; going beyond Europe, penetrating
other markets; exploration of novel research strands etc.
http://www.meta-net.eu 23

24. Setup – Timeframe
q Close collaboration with EC, EP and all other stakeholders
(including SMEs, research centres, universities, NGOs etc.).
q Mix of funding sources:
§ Horizon 2020 (WP 2018-2020) for EU projects (RA, RIA, CSA)
§ National/regional funding sources:
- Production of monolingual technologies and data sets
- Support and grow SMEs in this area
q Timeframe 2018, 2019, 2020:
§ Includes set of mission-critical services and applications
http://www.meta-net.eu – http://www.cracker-project.eu 24

25. Next Steps
a) extend Cracking the Language Barrier federation (BDVA?);
b) discuss MDSM SRIA V0.9 with BDVA: what are BDVA’s
concrete requirements and priorities with regard to LT?
c) specify concrete set of research results and services;
prioritise needed applications, services, research areas;
d) MDSM SRIA V1.0 to be finalised in Q1 2017;
http://www.meta-net.eu 25
Language
Technology
for Big Data
Applications
Multilingual
Digital
Single
Market

26. Thank you for your attention.
georg.rehm@dfki.de
http://www.meta-net.eu
http://www.facebook.com/META.Alliance
http://www.cracker-project.eu
http://www.cracking-the-language-barrier.eu
26