Cases of high-impact use of Language Technologies

Within the framework of the ILENIA project aiming to develop multilingual applications for the languages spoken in Spain, Langune, Emun and the HITZ centre (Basque Centre for Language Technologies) opened up a space for reflection in which the sectors concerned were invited to respond to a questionnaire. The aim was to identify the cases of use displaying a high socioeconomic impact that today’s society, industry or other sectors may have. By the deadline for completing the questionnaire, the three institutions had conducted 17 interviews and received 282 responses to the questionnaire: 20 from the language technologies sector, 94 from the industry and services sector, and 168 from education. On the basis of the replies received, they will identify new areas or uses with the potential to expand.

This is one of the subtasks of the ILENIA project, and the aim is to identify and develop cases of use that have a great impact in the field of language technology. Innovative applications will be identified, analysed and promoted through the development of text, voice and neural translator technologies and their combinations, among other things.

Language technologies based on artificial intelligence and natural language processing have developed remarkably in recent decades, making possible many applications, such as machine translation, voice recognition and synthesis, analysis and creation of texts from large language models such as ChatGPT, etc. We already use these technologies in our daily lives, both on a personal and professional level, but failure to manage languages properly is rendering the language diversity of this society invisible, and so the ILENIA project is aiming to develop multilingual applications in the languages spoken in Spain.