T4ME Net · Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society

Linguistic diversity is a corner stone of our multicultural European society. To preserve this essential asset in the age of the emerging information and knowledge society, Europe needs ICT technologies and applications at affordable costs that<br/>• enable communication, collaboration and participation across language boundaries• secure their language users equal access to the information and knowledge society• support each language in the advanced functionalities of networked ICT<br/>Prerequisites of these applications are advances in several fields of Human Language Technologies (HLT) such as<br/>• machine translation (MT) including automatic translation and machine assisted human translation• technologies for information and knowledge management including IR, crosslingual IR and corporate memories• technologies for document and content production and management (including authoring tools, language checking and interactive content applications)• technologies for intuitive interfaces to all types of technology (including multimodal user interfaces, speech interfaces for interactive mobile applications, robot control interfaces)<br/>Building a single EU information space reflecting and supporting the cultural diversity of our continent as an adequate foundation for the multilingual European information and knowledge society is a major challenge. Because of the complexity of human language and the number of languages to be included this challenge demands a large collective effort of research and language communities as well as several industrial sectors.<br/>T4ME shall seek progress by approaching open pro¬blems in collaboration with other research fields such as machine learning, social computing, cognitive systems, knowledge technologies and multimedia content. It shall mobilize and strengthen the European HLT community encompassing researchers, developers and language professionals through networking of research and by creating new schemes of sharing resources and efforts.