CEF Telecom funding keeps advancing machine translation and language technologies

Machine translation and language technologies nowadays allow us to access several online or offline services in multiple languages. The European Union promotes multilingualism and supports the deployment of such technologies through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom Programme.

CEF Telecom funding helps European and national public administrations exchange information across Europe, and provides machine translation capabilities (eTranslation) that will enable multilingualism in all EU Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs).

Meet the projects

A number of projects have been delivering great results and contributing to the success of the Automated Translation service. Meet these two eTranslation projects:

• User-Focused Marian aimed at improving the pre-existing neural machine translation toolkit “Marian” to address the needs of CEF eTranslation and to broaden its user base. This collaborative language tools’ project provided user access to text flagging by adding support for factors to support forced translation. It also supported the automated adaptation facility by adding support for on-the-fly domain adaptation using large translation memories with a well-defined API.
• CEFAT4Cities: the project focused on developing a “Smart cities natural language context”, adding multilingual interoperability to the Context Broker DSI and making public “smart city” services multilingual, with pilots in Vienna and Brussels. CEFAT4Cities targeted the following languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Slovenian, Croatian and Norwegian. As a result, the project provided a quality-assured workflow for the multilingual extraction and aggregation of ontologies, vocabularies and question-answer pairs. The dynamic multilingual repository of questions and answers can be used to develop multilingual applications such as chat bots and wizards.

Background information

The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom Programme is a key EU programme to facilitate cross-border interaction between public administrations, businesses and citizens, by deploying digital service infrastructures (DSIs) and broadband networks. Supported projects contribute to the creation of a European ecosystem of interoperable and interconnected digital services that sustain the Digital Single Market.

Useful Links

CEF Telecom Brochure (November 2020)