On July 8, the third edition of “The European Language Resource Coordination” or ELRC workshop was held in Belgium (https://www.lr-coordination.eu/index.php/). The organisation of this workshop is in hands of the LT3 Language and Technology Team of Ghent University.  The ELRC is a European initiative and aims to improve the European language and translation technology. Public services are mostly targeted, since they use these European automatic translation systems as well.

Nathalie De Sutter, Managing Partner at Untranslate, was on the panel on “Language data creation, management and sharing: existing practices and challenges”. She shared her experience with language data, as Nathalie is not only guest lecturer at several universities all over Belgium, but she also takes on the role of consultant at numerous governmental authorities. As consultant, she is involved in the sharing of data sets that are used for NLP applications. Furthermore, as an experienced translation coordinator, Nathalie sees first-hand which challenges the use of language data presents. What are the legal conditions? How should the original file formats be converted to meet industrial standards and in a way they can be imported in CAT (Computer Aided Translation) tools? How can data be kept up to date in a continuously changing world? And last but not least: how do you find your way in the vast amount of sources, tools and information available on the Internet?

At the end of the panel, participants were given the opportunity to ask all relevant questions during an interactive session. This session followed the captivating presentations of Prof. Dr. Véronique Hoste, Prof. Dr. Lieve Macken, François Thunus and Dr. Tom Vanallemeersch.

By the end of the session, all participants were up to date on the latest evolution with regards to AI, neural machine translation and the CEF platform (the Machine Translation System of the European Commission)!

For more information, visit https://lr-coordination.eu/belgium3rd