AI’s new frontiers in language technologies: FBK among key players

How to preserve Europe’s linguistic diversity and cultural plenty? Thanks to technological excellence in the field. With a launch event on February 18 and 19 in Villers-Cotterêts, ALT-EDIC4EU was launched: the first of two major European projects involving the Alliance for Language Technologies European Digital Infrastructure Consortium and thus Fondazione Bruno Kessler as a partner.

Today, AI technologies for language are dominated by solutions developed by large multinational corporations.  The ALT-EDIC was created with the idea of enabling European states to put up a united front and carve out a space where they can develop AI technologies that respect European multilingualism and cultural diversity and that are respectful of the ethical and human values that set us apart.”  Alessio Brutti, FBK’s scientific contact for ALT-EDIC and Head of the SpeechTek Lab Unit of FBK’s Center for Augmented Intelligence, explains.  “For Fondazione Bruno Kessler,” Brutti adds, ”and in particular for the groups involved in speech and language technologies, being part of this initiative is obviously a great opportunity both in terms of positioning and visibility, and to be able to collaborate with laboratories of excellence and companies to do high-level research towards the development of ethical AI with human beings at the center.”

What is ALT-EDIC?

ALT-EDIC is a Consortium, established at the European level in February 2024 with the mission to develop a common European infrastructure in the field of language technologies, focusing in particular on Large Language Models. It aims to improve European competitiveness, increase the availability of European language data, and support Europe’s linguistic diversity and cultural richness.

Coordinated by France, ALT-EDIC is supported by 17 member states, including Italy, joined by eight countries as observers. Fondazione Bruno Kessler thus represents our country-along with CINECA and CNR-ILC-on behalf of the government within the working groups and participates with its SpeechTek (STEK), Natural language processing (NLP), Machine Translation (MT) and Technologies for Vision (TeV) research units.

As its first action since its establishment, ALT-EDIC coordinated the submission of two proposals to the DIGITAL EUROPE DIGITAL-2024-AI-06 calls.

The Projects:

The first project, presented on February 18 and 19 in Villers-Cotterêts, is ALT-EDIC4EU and will enable ALT-EDIC to accelerate the development of a robust and scalable infrastructure and federate the European language technology ecosystem. It has been developed through extensive consultations with experts, institutions, public bodies and industries from strategic sectors: the project contact for Fondazione Bruno Kessler is Luisa Bentivogli.

The second project, LLMs4EU will also be launched in France on March 19-20 and aims to preserve European linguistic and cultural diversity in the digital age through cooperation between economic and academic actors. Here, FBK is even more deeply involved: the goal of the project is to make large anguage models (LLMs) and all the necessary tools for their exploitation openly available in all EU languages, capitalizing on existing European programs and expertise. The tools that will be made accessible to European companies will cover all steps from training LLMs to ensuring their compliance with European regulations. The project contact person for Fondazione Bruno Kessler is Alessio Brutti.