Annika Grützner-Zahn


2024

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Surveying the Technology Support of Languages
Annika Grützner-Zahn | Federico Gaspari | Maria Giagkou | Stefanie Hegele | Andy Way | Georg Rehm
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop Towards Digital Language Equality (TDLE): Focusing on Sustainability @ LREC-COLING 2024

Many of the world’s languages are left behind when it comes to Language Technology applications, since most of these are available only in a limited number of languages, creating a digital divide that affects millions of users worldwide. It is crucial, therefore, to monitor and quantify the progress of technology support for individual languages, which also enables comparisons across language communities. In this way, efforts can be directed towards reducing language barriers, promoting economic and social inclusion, and ensuring that all citizens can use their preferred language in the digital age. This paper critically reviews and compares recent quantitative approaches to measuring technology support for languages. Despite using different approaches and methodologies, the findings of all analysed papers demonstrate the unequal distribution of technology support and emphasise the existence of a digital divide among languages.

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Common European Language Data Space
Georg Rehm | Stelios Piperidis | Khalid Choukri | Andrejs Vasiļjevs | Katrin Marheinecke | Victoria Arranz | Aivars Bērziņš | Miltos Deligiannis | Dimitris Galanis | Maria Giagkou | Katerina Gkirtzou | Dimitris Gkoumas | Annika Grützner-Zahn | Athanasia Kolovou | Penny Labropoulou | Andis Lagzdiņš | Elena Leitner | Valérie Mapelli | Hélène Mazo | Simon Ostermann | Stefania Racioppa | Mickaël Rigault | Leon Voukoutis
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

The Common European Language Data Space (LDS) is an integral part of the EU data strategy, which aims at developing a single market for data. Its decentralised technical infrastructure and governance scheme are currently being developed by the LDS project, which also has dedicated tasks for proof-of-concept prototypes, handling legal aspects, raising awareness and promoting the LDS through events and social media channels. The LDS is part of a broader vision for establishing all necessary components to develop European large language models.

2022

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Introducing the Digital Language Equality Metric: Contextual Factors
Annika Grützner-Zahn | Georg Rehm
Proceedings of the Workshop Towards Digital Language Equality within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In our digital age, digital language equality is an important goal to enable participation in society for all citizens, independent of the language they speak. To assess the current state of play with regard to Europe’s languages, we developed, in the project European Language Equality, a metric for digital language equality that consists of two parts, technological and contextual (i.e., non-technological) factors. We present a metric for calculating the contextual factors for over 80 European languages. For each language, a score is calculated that reflects the broader context or socio-economic ecosystem of a language, which has, for a given language, a direct impact for technology and resource development; it is important to note, though, that Language Technologies and Resources related aspects are reflected by the technological factors. To reduce the vast number of potential contextual factors to an adequate number, five different configurations were calculated and evaluated with a panel of experts. The best results were achieved by a configuration in which 12 manually curated factors were included. In the factor selection process, attention was paid to data quality, automatic updatability, inclusion of data from different domains, and a balance between different data types. The evaluation shows that this specific configuration is stable for the official EU languages; while for regional and minority languages, as well as national non-official EU languages, there is room for improvement.