Author: Marko Robnik-Šikonja (UL)
META-FORUM is a series of annual conferences on language technologies with a focus on EU languages. The 2019 edition of the conference focused on the emerging European Language Grid (ELG) platform, which intends to become yellow pages for language resources and technologies.
The two-day conference (8th and 9th of September) gathered representatives of EU language-related projects, companies, and public institutions. Besides panel presentations and discussion forums, many projects prepared demonstrations of their ideas and progress. The EMBEDDIA project was represented by Matt Purver from the Queen Mary University of London, Andraž Pelicon from Jožef Stefan Institute, and Marko Robnik-Šikonja from the University of Ljubljana. The team showed a demo of multilingual offensive speech detector, which was trained only on English data but worked for over 90 languages thanks to cross-lingual embeddings. The demo received a warm welcome of its visitors.
As a part of pre-conference meetings, EU H2020 projects, financed in ICT-29 call, discussed closer cooperation with ELG. The ELG team intends to integrate different language services as docker images. The EMBEDDIA project presented resources and technologies it will build and challenges of integrating them into the ELG.
