Rafael Rivera Pastor
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 165
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In the digital era, language barriers represent a major challenge preventing European citizens and businesses from fully benefiting from a truly integrated Europe. These barriers particularly affect the less educated and older population, as well as speakers of smaller and minority languages, thus creating a notable language divide. Language barriers have a profound effect on (1) cross-border public services, (2) fostering a common European identity, (3) workers' mobility, and (4) cross-border e-commerce and trade, in the context of a Digital Single Market. The emergence of new technological approaches such as deep-learning neural networks, based on increased computational power and access to sizeable amounts of data, are making Human Language Technologies (HLT) a real solution to overcoming language barriers. However, several factors, such as market fragmentation, uncoordinated research and insufficient funding, are hindering the European HLT industry, while putting underresourced languages in danger of digital extinction. Moreover, language technologies are not properly represented in the agenda of European policy-makers, although they are likely to be crucial for the construction of a fair and truly integrated European Union. Based on the analysis of the current state of affairs, we argue for setting up a multidisciplinary large-scale coordinated initiative, the European Human Language Project (HLP). Within the HLP, eleven policies are proposed and assessed. These policies are grouped into: institutional policies, research policies, industry policies, market policies, and public service policies.