ESTeam

In a recent Forbes Technology article, council member Joao Graca states that Language Operations should be the new paradigm in globalization. He hits the nail on the head by saying that serving global markets is no longer about broadcasting translated content, but rather enabling businesses to communicate with stakeholders no matter what language they speak. LangOps is an enterprise function formed of cross-functional and multidisciplinary teams which efficiently operationalize the management of textual data. Neural machine translation (NMT) and multilingual knowledge management are indispensable tools to win, understand, and support global customers.

Release the Machine Translation Handbrake

NMT is approaching human parity for many domains and language pairs thanks to algorithmic progress, computing power, and the availability of data. Yet executives are still asking themselves why these breakthroughs have so far had only marginal effects on translation costs, lag, and quality.
The main reasons for this are a price model still based on translation memory™ match categories and the use of the timeworn formula IF Fuzzy < x% THEN MT. In addition, terminology – which is crucial for quality, process, and analytics – often leads a pitiful existence in Excel columns or sidelined term bases. While most focus on how to squeeze the last, rather meaningless drop of BLEU score out of the NMT black box, the real benefits will only be delivered by a LangOps strategy carried out by an automated workflow and reliable resource management.

Language Operations

LangOps is built on software that automates translation and language management. AI and Machine Learning have revolutionized the process, but for many tasks a rule-based approach is still superior. As always in engineering, it’s a question of piecing it smartly and pragmatically together. For example, while NMT is replacing segment-based translation memories, the cheapest and best method will always be the recycling of previously translated content. Terminology is baked into both NMT and TM, and thus is easily overlooked. LangOps, on the other hand, elevates terminology to multilingual knowledge. It is not only used for quality estimation and assurance, but also as the key meta data to drive processes. LangOps builds a multilingual data factory optimized for costs, time, and quality needs.

AI with Experts-in-the-Loop

The efficiency of LangOps needs to be complemented by the part of the process which involves humans. LangOps classifies linguistic assets, human resources, workflow rules, and projects in a unified system which is expandable, dynamic, and provides fallback paths. For example, the workflow knows who has carried out a similar project before, who has expertise in a particular domain, or how many hours an expert will typically need for a specific task. LangOps will enable the building of scalable language factories that leave the outdated price-per-word business model in the dust of transactional translations, and will power a move towards cloud-based service levels.

Cut Costs, then Drive the Top-Line

LangOps typically starts with translation because that’s where enterprises have created their linguistic assets. While cutting globalization costs is important, executives are more interested in how LangOps can drive growth.
Machine translation allows enterprises to communicate instantly with their customers. Terminology databases can be upgraded to multilingual knowledge systems (MKS), which allow companies to not only broadcast localized content to global customers, but also actually understand them when they talk back. An MKS not only enables e-Commerce players to deploy language-neutral product search, but is also a proven solution to make data repositories, systems, organizations, and even countries interoperable. It also crucially provides the unified semantics for the Internet of Things. All of these benefits boost LangOps, which owns the normalized enterprise knowledge and is the basis for many critical customer-facing activities such as customer support, chatbots, text analytics, spare part ordering, compliance, and sales.

Get in touch with us here to learn more about how LangOps can grow also your top-line.

Blog post that originally occurred in September 2021 on the Multilingual Knowledge blog

Semantix and its long-term partner ESTeam have been awarded the EU Commission’s call for tender GROW/2020/OP/0002. The service contract represents a total value of 34 MEUR and is one of the largest in Europe. Semantix is the leading language company in the Nordics, currently ranking #13 worldwide. ESTeam is a tech company known for innovative NLP, knowledge management, and multilingual data solutions. Further a significant partner for the collaboration will be Summa Linguae.

The contract is for translation services associated with the technical regulations and rules on information society services laid down in Directive (EU) 2015/15351. Also called the "Single Market Transparency Directive, SMTD", this procedure is a preventive monitoring instrument managed by the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SME's for the whole Commission to ensure the proper functioning of the internal market.

The contract was won in competition with Europe’s most experienced services providers. It marks a breakthrough in offering an AI-driven solution for translation services that adds unified human and linguistic asset classification, content recycling, Coreon's knowledge-based terminology recognition, and semantic quality assessment to the process.

Britta Aagaard, Chief Business Officer at Semantix states: ”The award of this major contract and the innovative solution proposed will further position Semantix as industry leading language technology company for multilingual services”, and she continues, “For many years, ESTeam and Semantix have successfully collaborated on highly complex large-scale projects combining multilingual processing with a semantic information infrastructure and a powerful services organisation.”

Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam: “In spite of the breath-taking progress of AI, customers of LSPs haven’t enjoyed much innovation since the rollout of CAT in the 90s. We are thrilled that in partnership with proactive Semantix we are now delivering the game-changing benefits of state-of-the-art translation solutions to important customers.”

Coreon
Summa Linguae
Semantix

On 26 November 2020, eu-LISA will host its 7th Annual Conference "Interoperability – Building Digital Resilience for the EU Justice and Home Affairs Community", organised in cooperation with the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

This year's event will be entirely digital. We anticipate the live broadcast via a dedicated virtual platform will reach an even broader audience, facilitating the same level of interaction as a physical conference with participants being able to ask questions, comment, participate in polls and network.

The event focusses on the paradigm shift introduced by interoperability, one of the EU Justice and Home Affairs domain's top priorities, while also reflecting on aspects pertaining to technical implementation. The panellists will explore how the JHA community can benefit from an enhanced focus on innovation and technology as well as on the potential influence of innovation and the latest technological solutions to policy-making at EU and national levels. Furthermore, possible implications from the COVID-19 pandemic on the acceleration of digital transformation, as well as benefits and possibilities for the law enforcement sector stemming from the new information architecture will also be discussed.

eu-LISA homepage
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TRUSTinAI – Responsible AI for Science and Society

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence within the framework of the German EU Council Presidency.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to make a decisive contribution to overcoming the major challenges facing society. Success and acceptance depend largely on how responsibly AI is developed and applied.

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For decades Computer Assisted Translation based on translation memories has been the standard tool for going global. Although CAT had been originally designed with a mid-90s PC in mind and there have been proposals for changing the underlying data model, the basic architecture of CAT has been left unchanged. The dramatic advances in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have now made the whole product category obsolete.

NMT Crossing the Rubicon

While selling translation memory I always said, machines will only be able to translate once they understand text. And if one day machines would, MT will be a mere footnote of a totally different revolution. Turns out that neural networks stacked deeply enough do understand us sufficiently to create a well formed translation. Over the last two years NMT has progressed dramatically. It has now achieved “human parity” for important language pairs and domains. That changes everything.

Industry Getting it Wrong

Most players in the $50b translation industry, service providers but also customers, think that NMT is just another source for a translation proposal. In order to preserve their established way of delivery they pitch the concept of “augmented translation”. However, if the machine translation is as good (or bad) as human translation, who would you have revise it, another translator or a subject matter expert?
Yes, the expert who knows what the text is about. The workflow is thus changing to automatic translation and expert revision. Translation becomes faster, cheaper, and better!

Different Actors, Different Tools

A revision UI will have to look very different to a CAT tool. The most dramatic change is that revision UI has to be extremely simple. To support the current model of augmented translation, CAT tools have become very powerful. However, their complexity can only be handled by a highly demanded group of ten thousands of professional translators globally.
For the new workflow a product design is required that can support dozens of millions of, mostly occasional, revisers. Also, the revisers need to be pointed to the texts which need revision. This requires multilingual knowledge.

Disruption Powered by Coreon

Coreon can answer the two key questions for using NMT in a professional translation workflow: a) which parts of the translated text are not fit-for-purpose and b) why not? To do so the multilingual knowledge system classifies linguistic assets, human resources, QA, and projects in a unified system which is expandable, dynamic, and provides fallback paths. In the future linguists will engineer localization workflows and create multilingual knowledge in Coreon. "Doing words” is left to NMT.

Blog post that originally occurred in Dec 2018 on the Multilingual Knowledge Blog

The Language Technology Industry Summit is Europe’s major event showcasing the latest developments in multilingual ambient intelligence: speech interaction, deep meaning processing and multilingual communication & cognition. The Summit is the ideal meeting point between technology providers, users & integrators, business leaders, leading-edge developers & researchers, investors & analysts. It is a unique place to learn, exchange, network, forge new partnerships, find new clients and get tuned to the multilingual intelligent future.

Meet and listen to ESTeam CEO Jochen Hummel at the summit.

LTI Summit Homepage

JIAMCATT is the "International Annual Meeting on Computer-Assisted Translation and Terminology". It was established as a IAMLADP task force and provides its participants with a forum for debate, exchange of expertise and cooperation in the fields of computer-assisted terminology and translation, interpretation and documentation retrieval.

Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO, will set the stage with his opening keynote “Sunsetting CAT”
Although NMT is approaching human parity the algorithms have no real understanding of text. Adding human knowledge improves the processes before and after machine translation decisively. In concert with Multilingual Knowledge Systems NMT becomes a game changer.

JIAMCATT 2019 Homepage

As a triple-punch event featuring exhibits, conferences and networking, CEBIT covers the digitization of business, government and society from every angle. Its four sections – d!conomy, d!tec, d!talk and d!campus – represent an entirely new approach, but one thing remains: the show’s core focus on generating leads and business for all concerned!

Join a presentation from ESTeam CEO Jochen Hummel on Data Interoperability in IoT and Industry 4.0 – Semantic Interoperability connects devices, platforms, and people on Wed, 13 June in the context of the CeBIT Internet of Things Forum.

Link to presentation
CeBIT homepage

The Digital Assembly is a major annual forum that gathers more than 1,000 stakeholders and high-level policymakers to debate the EU digital policy and the implications of recent technological developments.

This year's edition comes at a crucial time as the European Council has called for the full implementation of the Digital Single Market strategy by 2018. At the same time the Commission proposal for the next Multiannual Financial Framework is being discussed by Member States and the European Parliament. Part of the future long-term budget of the EU will be used to bridge digital investment gaps between Member States and tackle challenges in key areas of the digital economy. A large number of EU citizens and businesses is expected to benefit from such process.

Meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event.

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On March 22-24 the DTT Symposion (short DTT) took place again in Mannheim. It is the bi-annual meeting of the German Terminology Association (Deutscher Terminologietag). We were exhibiting and I enjoyed talking to many Coreon customers there. It was a truly exciting event this year and according to the organizers the most busy ever. 200+ participants meant house full!

After a half day of pre-event workshops, the event kicked off Friday morning with a presentation from Martin Volk (University Zürich) on parallel corpora, terminology extraction, and MT. Martin challenged the hype around Neural Machine Translation and pinpointed some weaknesses: “NMT operates with a fixed vocabulary. But real world translation has to deal with new words constantly … how can we ensure terminology-consistent translation?”. His research confirms what we've outlined in an blog post: Why Machine Learning still Needs Humans for Language.

“Concept Maps Everywhere”

Back to the event … as one participant tweeted, concept maps were the dominating topic throughout the days. First a workshop by Annette Weilandt (eccenca) on taxonomy, thesauri, and ontologies, followed by a presentation by Petra Drewer (University Karlsruhe). Petra unveiled a plethora of benefits:

• insight into the domain
• systematic presentation
• clear distinction between concepts
• identification of gaps
• equivalence checks across languages
• new opportunities in AI contexts

No surprise, my event highlight was the Coreon customer presentation from Liebherr on the benefits of multilingual knowledge systems. In this very entertaining presentation Lukas Auer (Liebherr MCCtec) and Johannes Widmann (Liebherr Holding) outlined how pragmatic and effective the work with concept systems turns out. They concluded: “If we all think in networks, why should our termbase then be designed as an alphabetic list of terms??” Instead, the concept system driven approach has many advantages such as training of new staff, context knowledge for technical authors and translators, terminological elaboration of specific domains, insight into the degree of how far a domain is already covered, avoiding doublettes etc. Download a case study from the Coreon web site.

DTT 2018 Award for a Master Thesis on Coreon

And then the “i-Tüpfelchen” (cherry on the cake) on Friday afternoon: David Reininghaus received this year’s DTT award on his master thesis: “Applying concept maps onto terminology collections: implementation of WIPO terminology with Coreon”. David analyzed in his work how a real graph driven technology outperforms simple hyperlink based approaches: no redundancies, more efficient, less error-prone. David further developed an XSL-based method how to transform the MultiTerm / TBX hyperlink based workarounds into a real graph, visualized in Coreon.

Deutsche Bahn: Terminology-Driven AI Applications

Tom Winter (Deutsche Bahn and President of the DTT) illustrated in his session how terminology boosts AI applications. Through already simple synonym expansion the intranet search engines are now more meaningful (a search for the unofficial "Schaffner" now finds even documents where only the approved "Zugbegleiter" was used). Other applications are automatic pre-processing of incoming requests in a customer query-answering system or even improving Alexa driven speech interaction at ticket vending machines … who says terminology is still a niche application?

From Language to Knowledge

I am excited about the evolution of the DTT in recent years. How many more participants will we see in spring 2020? I am convinced the more the DTT community continues to leave the pure documentation niche and the more the focus moves onto areas that our customer Liebherr or Tom Winter have illustrated, the relevance and awareness level of the community will continue to grow. So that the organisers can again proudly announce:
Ausgebucht – no more seats left!

Original Blog Post from the Multilingal Knowledge Blog

Natural Language Processing has seen quite a revival with Internet giants putting a lot of smart heads at solving NLP’s toughest problems. Incredible progress in processor speed allows to stack neural networks so deep that the successes in computer vision are repeated in NLP. Even though words are arbitrary symbols and as such fundamentally different from imagery, sentiment analysis, document classification, semantic search, and even Machine Translation, all work pretty well now.

Project managers have to be careful with vendors’ claims and managers’ dreams to just throw in lots of data and the machine will figure it out by itself. Still, Machine Learning tuned with human knowledge and domain terminology achieves production quality for many tasks and in most languages.

More dramatic, however, is the opposite effect: the pivotal role NLP plays for Artificial Intelligence. Despite the impressive advances in AI like beating humans in Go, one fundamental capability remains elusive: language. Siri and Alexa can follow simple commands and answer basic questions (in a handful languages) but can’t hold a conversation. They have no real understanding of the words they use.

Language will determine whether machines become a part of our everyday life or whether they remain mysterious black boxes. As MIT’s Josh Tenenbaum brings it to the point “There’s no way you can have an AI system that’s humanlike that doesn’t have language at the heart of it”. Sure, we can have immensely powerful software but without language our relationship with AI will be far less collaborative. And probably far less friendly.

It is thus hard to envision how we will interact with AI without language, without being able to ask machines, “Why?” and “What are you thinking about?”. This will require a lot of knowledge about language but also a huge amount of domain and common-sense knowledge about the world. Only then we can solve the hardest of all challenges. So hard, that it has been stated almost 70 years ago as the ultimate test for the existence of Artificial Intelligence: a meaningful conversation with a machine.

Come to Brussels to attend the LTI summit and have a fruitful exchange with people who work on making this dream become true.
Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO

LT Summit homepage

Europe's No.1 Industrial IoT Show – Industry of Things World is an international knowledge exchange platform bringing together more than 1000 high-level executives who play an active role in the Industrial Internet of Things scene to rethink technology & business strategy for scalable, secure and efficient IoT: cloud, robotics, automation, standards, interoperability, security, data!

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The decision makers of Health IT will come together at the conhIT – Connecting Healthcare IT. A unique combination of Trade Fair, Congress, Academy and Networking Events, conhIT is the ideal platform for establishing and cultivating business relationships, for keeping informed about developments in this sector, and for discussions.

Meet Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event.

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The biggest challenge for widespread adoption of the Internet of Things is interoperability. A much-noticed McKinsey report states that achieving interoperability in IoT would unlock an additional 40% of value. This is not surprising since the IoT is in essence about connecting machines, devices, and sensors – ideally cross organization, cross industries, and even cross borders. But while technical and syntactic interoperability are pretty much solved, little has been available so far to make sure devices actually understand each other.

Focus Semantic Interoperability
Embedded Computing Design superbly describes the situation in a recent series of articles. Technical interoperability, the fundamental ability to exchange raw data (bits, frames, packets, messages), is well understood and standardized. Syntactic interoperability, the ability to exchange structured data, is supported by standard data formats such as XML and JSON. Core connectivity standards such as DDS or OPC-UA provide syntactic interoperability cross-industries by communicating through a proposed set of standardized gateways.
Semantic interoperability, though, requires that the meaning (context) of exchanged data is automatically and accurately interpreted. Several industry bodies have tried to implement semantic data models. However, these semantic data schemes have either been way too narrow for cross-industry use cases or had to stay too high-level. Without schemes data from IoT devices lack information to describe their own meaning. Therefore, a laborious and, worse, inflexible normalization effort is required before that data can be really used.
Luckily there is a solution: abstract metadata from devices by creating an IoT knowledge system.

Controlled Vocabulary and Ontologies
A controlled vocabulary is a collection of identifiers which ensure consistency of metadata terminology. These terms are used to label concepts (nodes) in a graph which provides a standardized classification for a particular domain. Such ontology, incorporating characteristics of a taxonomy and thesaurus, links concepts with their terms and attributes in semantic relationships. This way it provides metadata abstraction. It represents knowledge in machine-readable form and thus functions as a knowledge system for specific domains and their IoT applications.

IoT Knowledge Systems made Easy
A domain ontology can be maintained in a repository completely abstracted from any programming environment. It needs to be created and maintained by domain experts. With the explosive growth of IoT constantly new devices, applications, organizations, industries, and even countries are added. Metadata abstraction parallels object-oriented programming and unfortunately so do the tools used so far to maintain and extend ontologies.
But now the SaaS solution Coreon makes sure that IoT devices understand each other. Not only does Coreon function with its API as a semantic gateway in the IoT connectivity architecture, it also provides a modern, very easy-to-use application to maintain ontologies; featuring a user interface domain experts can actually work with. With Coreon they can deliver the knowledge necessary for semantic interoperability so that IoT applications can unlock their full value.

Bosch ConnectedWorld 2018 Coreon Presentation slides

Social media play a central role in many people’s lives, and they also have a profound impact on businesses and society. Users post vast amounts of content (text, photos, audio, video) every minute. This user generated content (UGC) has become increasingly multimedia in nature. It documents users’ lives, revealing in real time their interests and concerns and activities in society. The analysis of UGC can offer insights to individual and societal concerns and could be beneficial to a wide range of applications, for example, tracking mobility in cities, identifying citizen’s issues, opinion mining, and much more.

In contrast to classical media, social media thrive by allowing anyone to publish content with few constraints and no oversight. Social media posts thus show great variation in length, content, quality, language, speech and other aspects. This heterogeneity poses new challenges for standard content access and analysis methods. On the other hand, UGC is often related to other public information (e.g. product reviews or discussion of news articles), and there often is rich contextual information linking, which allows for new types of analyses.

In this seminar, we aim at discussing the specific properties of UGC, the general research tasks currently operating on this type of content, identifying their limitations and lacunae, and imagining new types of applications made possible by the availability of vast amounts of UGC.

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Let's talk about Artificial Intelligence!

A full day conference for game-changers, opinion influencers, change-makers and knowledge seekers. We connect entrepreneurs with investors, corporations, the media, researchers and politicians active in the AI sphere.

Meet Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event.

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There’s never been a more crucial time to get your head in the Cloud. Artificial intelligence. Design thinking. Collaborative software development. Data security. Given the speed at which tech trends and issues move today, many businesses are experiencing a serious case of whiplash. Yet no one can afford to slow down. To remain competitive in a customer-centric world, it’s vital that organizations analyze and explore the best Cloud practices underlying all these remarkable developments – and to stay on top of those coming down the road.

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On 3 – 5 March the 15th DTT Symposion took place in Mannheim. With approximately 160 participants this bi-annual event is probably the largest German speaking conference on terminology. In an exhibition hall several tools and services providers including Coreon presented their offerings. The focus theme of this year's event was "Terminology and Culture". I had slight worries before the conference whether it will be too theoretic, with many "dry" lectures and without practical impact. But no – I was positively surprised by the opposite: Many presentations, particularly during the two afternoon sessions, made the bridge from the humanities research to best practices in daily life.

Focus on Concept Maps

In fact I was very happy to see that the topic of Concept Maps, that systematic terminology work via concept systems is now an established focus of the DTT. Many presenters support our approach and confirm the value of Multilingual Knowledge Systems. Below a couple of my, very personal, highlights and take-aways from the sessions:

Begriffsimperialismus

The first conference day morning sessions settled the theoretical foundations. Peter A. Schmitt's (University Leipzig) as well as Wolfgang Sturz' (Transline) contributions highlighted that you can't separate culture from technology. Namely when comparing two cultures one will see that a given artifact has in each culture very specific characteristics. This cultural context influences terminologies, for instance in a temporal way (past versus today) or regional (American – British).

A highlight for me was F. Massion's (D.O.G.) presentation on "Begriffsimperialismus" (can I translate this with "imperialism imposed through concepts"?), i.e. the questionable practice to rely on one language's concept system as the baseline for developing terminologies – Massion's most important point was to develop methods and tools that respect the different concept systems across organizations and languages. He dived deep into concept system modeling. I fully support the key message in his talk: A concept never lives alone! We learn new concepts via existing knowledge structures. A concept is a member of several concepts systems – or, in other words: as many experts, as many definitions! Therefore, tools that model concept systems must support polyhierarchy and it would be even better if they support multidimensional relations, as well as – ideally – allow role based views on the concept systems.

SAP's Cloud: Simplicity, Good Search, Little Training

Mark Childress (SAP, and also president of the DTT e.V.) illustrated SAP's vision of modernizing and moving the SAP terminology database into the cloud: users expect simplicity, simple search means, little training. The data must be accessible on every device, via keyboard or voice. And also support collaboration, i.e. involvement of external experts. For me Mark's presentation confirmed the product design strategy of Coreon – namely that not only consumer apps but also enterprise, B2B software solutions require appealing user interfaces together with intuitive interaction paths.

Pivoting at the EU

On the 2nd day of the conference, Rodolfo Maslias (European Parliament) broadened the view and the larger political context: the EU institutions' terminology work should support multicultural legislative procedures. How to tackle cultural differences (North-South, East-West)? Today, the EU has 24 official languages, but the "Europe of Nations" more and more evolves into a "Europe of Regions". Irish is currently being added to the list of languages, what would happen to languages such as Catalan? In daily life, the need to support 24*23 languages, i.e. 552 language combinations, is only fulfilled through the pivot languages English, German, French. Rodolfo also made a clear statement that a lingua franca such as English works only for basic needs. Whereas collaboration and expert exchange in each and every domain must allow the participants to use their mother tongue.

Merging Legal System in South Tyrol

Elena Chiocchetti (EURAC) then illustrated in the context of the South Tyrolian legal system the challenges to bring two concept systems (German, Italian) together. While in theory the goal is to identify equivalent and appropriate terms (and also a comparable government body) in real life it will be often rather an approximation driven by functional equivalency.

Multingual Knowledge with Coreon

I then had the pleasure to present just before lunch … I could nicely resume F. Massion's thoughts from the previous day: How ESTeam spin-off Coreon models different perspectives onto one and the same concept, what it means for its terms as well as its relations and how well the standards TBX and SKOS tackle these challenges.

The Must of Concept Maps

In a joint presentation Klaus Fleischmann (Kaleidoscope) and Alexandra Hanischläger (KTM) then launched a fireworks of arguments for working with concept maps: without a map it is difficult to identify terminological gaps – maps help to detect synonyms – concept relations express at least as much information as the written descriptions – union of textual plus semantical information helps to disambiguate. Last but not least, concept maps are very useful in training new employees. Anyone still questioning the benefit of multilingual knowledge systems?

Milos Jakubicek then illustrated "Sketch Engine", an online service for terminology extraction based on large corpora. While I can't yet judge about the linguistic quality of this service, I very appreciate the trend to move also terminology extraction into the cloud and to offer it as a hosted service.

I am looking forward to the 16th DTT Symposion in 2018 – by the way, Mannheim and the Dorint Hotel are a pretty good choice!

Conference Slides

Berlin is a growing city. The "Creating Urban Tech" conference series aims to concentrate and advance ideas, visions, and – naturally – also solutions for the needs of the metropolises of tomorrow. As a leading conference for the development of new urban technologies, "Creating Urban Tech" will serve to position Berlin, both nationally and internationally, as the location for technological developments in the urban sector during the years to come.

Meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event.

Conference Homepage

Last November 150 experts and I from all across the world attended the NATO Terminology Conference. The event took place at the campus of the NATO headquarters in Brussels, hosted by the NATO Standardization Office (NSO).

These two days were probably one of the most inspiring and valuable terminology conference days I've attended so far. I've never attended a terminology conference before where throughout the sessions the benefits of concept structures and multilingual concept maps were constantly emphasized. As far as I remember, it was Cristina Valentini from WIPO that cited one of her translators: "… only through the concept map did I understand what terminology is about".

I thank Folkert Zijlstra and his team from the NSO for a great conference, and also giving us the opportunity to present about the benefits of Multilingual Knowledge Systems. Below I want to give you a brief overview of what for me were the highlights at the conference.

Major General Edvardas Mazeikis from the Lithuanian Air Force and Director of NSO gave an excellent opening and setting the context for the conference with the theme "There is no interoperability without standardization".
Ian Jones, former head of the Linguistic Service at NATO SHAPE in Mons, continued to provide a highly interesting chronological overview and historical perspective on terminology work – from the beginning of human language during Stone Age to Johnson's dictionary from 1755 to Eugen Wüster's pioneer work and then to the first written terminology "cards" at NATO in 1956. Ian is also co-author of the recent book Meeting the Language Challenge of NATO Operations.
Folkert from the NSO outlined the internal NATO Terminology Programme. One of the most interesting aspects for me was to understand how an organization like NATO deploys a strict, multi-layered approval process: from Subject Matter Experts to Delegate Committees and Senior Committees.
In the following session Chantal Reid, Translation Bureau Government Canada, and Ian McIlroy, National Defence Canada, provided guidelines how to assign ownership: Standardize at the lowest level. As an example, terminology that is unique to one organization, may be approved by that organization, whereas terminology that spans more than one organization must be standardized at department level.

The afternoon sessions confirmed that conceptual structures are fundamental to properly manage terminology and that the linking of concepts takes terminology to a higher level, namely knowledge and when multilingual to a Multilingual Knowledge System.
Context, context, context! – Pamela Faber and Pilar León-Araúz from the University of Granada illustrated how principles of Frame Semantics are applied to terminology records, how knowledge structures, for instance levels of super-ordinate categories organize records: 'Patient transfer' -> 'evacuation' -> 'non-medical evacuation' -> 'casualty evacuation'. Pamela and Pilar highlighted how transparent this approach is and how it helps to fill gaps in the resource.
Cristina Valentini from the WIPO in Geneva, presented WIPO Pearl. I found it interesting to learn about the "paradox" when it comes to patent terminology: On the one hand the need for very precise terminology so that experts understand and assess a patent, but on the other hand the patent filer's interest who wants to achieve a very broad protection; therefore he chooses a less precise and rather vague terminology: compare 'glasses' – 'eyewear' versus the fuzzy construct 'eyesight correcting apparatus' … Noteworthy about Cristina's presentation for me was certainly the demo of WIPO Pearls concept cloud, WIPO's custom development of a concept map on top of existing terminology records. Through the concept map users trust the database more, since they become "confident in the unfamiliar".

Frieda Steurs, KU Leuven, started the 2^nd day. She assessed whether ISO Terminology Standards are a fit for NATO. In this context – terminology standardization aims at avoiding synonymy and misunderstandings – I really liked one of Frieda's slides where she used the phrase "competing terms" talking about synonyms; I will use that from now on, too! Frieda also highlighted ISO 24156-1 and how UML diagrams are used to create concept maps, a good reference standard for tool developers.
Danielle Henripin from the United Nations shared best practices when it comes to unifying data from many different sources: flexibility of the future system, migration milestones that favor gradual progress, automate tedious tasks, provide guidelines and training to overcome reluctance in the user base, and always Listen, Learn, Adapt.

Conference Official Summary

The 5th edition of the LT Industry Summit will take place in Brussels on 17 & 18 May 2016. The LT Industry Summit is the yearly point of convergence between the Language Technology Industry, its clients, research partners and policy makers.

Meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO and Chairman of LT Innovate, at the event.

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The Publications Office of the European Union is organising a conference on access to and reuse of EU legal information. The main aim of the conference is to spotlight the access and reuse services provided by the Publications Office, in particular highlighting the wide range of options offered by EUR-Lex – the gateway to law and legal information from the EU.
The conference will be of interest to a large audience, in particular legal professionals, information multipliers, publishers, commercial reusers, data journalists, information brokers and academics.

Meet Jochen Hummel (ESTeam CEO) and Gudrun Magnusdottir (ESTeam CSO) at the event.
Gudrun is an invited speaker in the Reuse Workshop.

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LT-Accelerate is a conference designed to help businesses, researchers and public administrations discover value via Language Technology.
A joint production of LT-Innovate — the association of the language technology industry — and U.S. consultancy Alta Plana Corporation, headed by industry analyst Seth Grimes, LT-Accelerate is about:

• Business insight in social, online, and enterprise data sources, discovered via…
• Big data analytics: Natural language processing, text & speech analytics, social intelligence, and semantic technologies, applied for…
• Essential business functions: Customer service and support, market research, social listening and engagement, policy & politics, and more, at…
• Modern, social, data-informed organisations.

Meet Jochen Hummel, Chairman of LT Innovate and CEO of ESTeam, at the event.

Event homepage

The European Data Forum (EDF) is a meeting for industry professionals, researchers, policymakers and members of community initiatives to discuss the challenges of Big Data and the emerging Data Economy and to develop suitable action plans for addressing these challenges. Of special focus for the EDF are Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), since they are driving innovation and competition in many data-driven economic sectors. The range of topics discussed at the European Data Forum ranges from novel data-driven business models (e.g. data clearing houses), and technological innovations (e.g. Linked Data Web) to societal aspects (e.g. open governmental data as well as data privacy and security).

Event homepage

The tekom annual conference together with the tcworld conference and tekom fair, is the largest global event and market-place for technical communication. The tekom annual conference is an absolute must for all companies that provide services and software pertaining to technical communication.

Meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO, and Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager, at the Coreon booth in hall C1 and discover recent developments in Crosslingual Search and Multilingual Knowledge Systems.

Event homepage

In an effort to exchange ideas and information on how large national and international institutions coordinate, standardize and otherwise manage their terminology, NATO will host a two-day conference on the management of institutional terminology on 19-20 November 2015.

The conference also intends to explore how terminology can be put to good use beyond translation (e.g. controlled authoring, knowledge management).

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at ESTeam, at the event.

Event Homepage

Delivering on the Promise of Search

Promises, promises! For years, enterprise search has promised to increase information discoverability, enhance corporate performance and profitability, and transform workplaces. It's time to deliver on these promises!

New technologies, next generation information access, and novel approaches to search and discovery are on the agenda for 2015. The conference looks at how to improve speed and relevancy, sound the death knell to those dreaded "blue lists" of results, and debate the merits of various technologies. The event considers the role of information governance as it affects search and discovery and investigate the intriguing challenges presented by mobile devices.

The many aspects of search and discovery include customers finding products, companies monetizing real time activities, and organizations maximizing the data they own. Leveraging internal data in light of cloud computing, outcome-based metrics, adaptive filtering, taxonomy and metadata tools, predictive analysis, open source, knowledge graphs, and mobile delivery raises people's expectations for search and discovery. Add Big Data into the mix and we have many promises on which to deliver! Rethink how to handle search, databases, analysis, and decision-making.

Attend our presentation on the Language of Search on Thu, 5th November at 11:15 a.m.
and meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO and Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO at the event.

Homepage of the event

Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO and Chairman of LT Innovate, foresees a major disruption in the Localisation Industry in the near future — one that will elevate the question of multilingual data from translation processes to a C-level concern. How can Language Technology leverage Big Data and transform the industry? Within this framework, Hummel introduces this quarter's issue of the GALAxy newsletter and invites readers to engage in this brave new world.

GALAxy newsletter

The LT-Innovate Summit is the yearly point of convergence for the European Language Technology Industry to network, discuss needs & strategies and explore innovation & business opportunities.

Meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO and Chairman of LT Innovate, at the summit in Brussels.

Summit homepage

The Digital Assembly 2015 will feature plenary sessions and workshops at which some of the key topics of the Digital Single Market strategy will be discussed, among which:

• Digital skills,
• Trust and confidence,
• Creative content,
• Ensuring access and connectivity,
• Building the digital economy for businesses and consumers,
• Promoting e-society,
• Digitising European industries and entreprises.

Meet Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event. Gudrun is an invited speaker to the track: Promoting e-society.

Promoting e-society
Digital Assembly 2015 homepage

Bridging the gap between data science and business: An evening of exciting talks from Data Science Industry leaders and experts.

Big Data Berlin Meetup homepage

Taxonomy Boot Camp is the only conference dedicated to exploring the successes, challenges, methodologies and products for taxonomies. Participants share experiences, knowledge and work with taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies, tagging mechanisms and other techniques for organizing information at this one-of-a-kind boutique learning and networking event.

Taxonomies are powerful tools used by a wide range of professionals, from marketers to data scientists, for solving diverse problems from navigation to product information management. This year’s Taxonomy Boot Camp is about highlighting taxonomy's many faces and sharing practical solutions in different real-world environments.

• On the web team? Learn how taxonomies can help improve the user experience and dynamically publish web content.
• Work in retail? Find out more about managing product information and creating good e-commerce experiences.
• Fascinated by everything? Wade in and get immersed — from enterprise taxonomies to ontologies, taxonomy tools, auto-classification, and everything in between.

Taxonomy Boot Camp homepage

The Smart Data Conference is designed to accommodate all levels of technical understanding, from novice through expert. It will bring together emerging disciplines that are focused on more intelligent information gathering and analysis, including:

Cognitive Computing
Machine Learning
Semantic Technologies
Artificial Intelligence
Deep Learning
Big Content
Linked Data
Natural Language Processing
Text Analysis
Voice processing
Image and Object Recognition
Video Analysis
Human Interfaces
Semantic Search
Big Data

Smart Data conference homepgae

GALA Language of Business conferences bring together industry leaders. In GALA's open, collaborative environment, they drive innovation through open-minded discussions about the opportunities and challenges facing the language industry. Growth is fostered for individuals and for the industry as a whole.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, at the conference.

GALA 2015 Conference homepage

Shaping the future of multilingual Europe

Top government officials, business leaders, technology developers, and language researchers will gather in Riga from April 27-29 to forge a unified vision for the multilingual digital single market.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event

Event homepage

The EPO Patent Information Conference 2014 will take place in Warsaw, Poland from 4 to 6 November 2014. It will be the meeting place this autumn for anyone who deals with patent data in their work.

This year’s programme picks up on some of the topics highlighted by speakers at last year's conference and examines them in more detail. Patent analysis, patent visualisation and the role of patent information in the strategy decision-making process have pride of place in the programme. The conference will also look at patent ownership and how to track down who owns patents; it will spotlight legal status data from Asia and take a look at future trends in patent searching.The programme will include a broad range of break-out sessions, training courses and discussion rounds. The exhibition is the leading one of its kind, where all the major patent information providers will be showcasing their latest products and services.

Meet Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event.

Conference homepage

With more and more Europeans travelling and living in another EU country, demand for cross-border services is on the increase. A significant effort has been already made by the European Commission and member states to make communication between EU countries easier. Numerous projects and initiatives have proved that it is possible, but there is still a long way ahead. Interoperable solutions have been implemented for cross-border services in many areas: e-Health, e-Justice, e-Procurement, business setup. To unlock the full potential of the European Single Market, generic solutions are needed to enable electronic transactions in new areas. The aim of the event will be to present the progress made so far towards this ambitious goal.

Meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event.

Event homepage

LT-Accelerate is a conference designed to help businesses, researchers and public administrations discover business value via Language Technology.
A joint production of LT-Innovate — the Forum for Europe's language technology industry — and U.S. consultancy Alta Plana Corporation, headed by industry analyst Seth Grimes, LT-Accelerate is about:

• Business insight in social, online, and enterprise data sources, discovered via…
• Big data analytics: Natural language processing, text & speech analytics, social intelligence, and semantic technologies, applied for…
• Essential business functions: Customer service and support, market research, social listening and engagement, policy & politics, and more, at…
• Modern, social, data-informed organisations.

Meet Jochen Hummel and Michael Wetzel at the event.
Listen to Michael's presentation on Knowledge Across Languages Friday morning, 5 December.

LT-Accelerate homepage

The tekom annual conference together with the tcworld conference and tekom fair is the largest global event and market place for technical communication.

Conference attendees are employed at industrial, software and service companies with their (current) focus on Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. An ever growing number of visitors from other European countries and overseas add to the flair of the event. The event is enriched by a large number of students from different countries making first contact with their future profession. A great plus is that, in addition to time attending presentations, adequate time for networking and exhibition visits is available. The entire array of subject topics is offered, providing opportunities for experts in all fields to reach their audience.

Meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO, and Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at the event – they present recent developments at the booth of Coreon, an ESTeam spin-off.

Event homepage

The ICT Proposers' day 2014 will be held in Florence. It focuses on the Horizon 2020 Work Programme for 2015:

• Information sessions on how to prepare and submit a proposal
• Topic information stands where European Commission officials provide up-to-date information on the research and innovation topics of the Work Programme 2015 and the content of the calls for proposals
• A European Commission ICT information desk to supply information on relevant topics, along with other information stands
• Networking sessions organised according to the Pillars and Topics of the Work Programme 2015 where potential proposers present their project ideas
• Booths, organised per villages, which serve as meeting points for people interested in the same research topics
• Ample space for informal networking and bilateral pre-arranged meetings between participants

Meet Jochen Hummel, ESTeam CEO and Gudrun Magnusdottir, ESTeam CSO, at the event.

Event homepage

The 11th International Conference on Terminology and Knowledge Engineering focuses this year on Ontology, Terminology and Text Mining. TKE 2014 will also cover applications, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, as well as requirements coming from the new e-society. The Scientific Programme will include invited talks and oral presentations.

This year in Berlin, TKE 2014 is hosted by ESTeam's partner company Coreon.

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at ESTeam at the event.

TKE 2014 homepage

LREC has become the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). The aim of LREC is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones.

LREC homepage

SEMIC 2014 brings together both the experts driving the practice of semantic technologies and those who have first-hand experience of implementing these standards in cross-border e-Government applications. SEMIC is the chance to learn more about semantic technologies, to be inspired by real-life case studies and share own experiences.

SEMIC 2014 homepage

The EDF is the annual meeting-point for data practitioners from industry, research, the public-sector and community initiatives, to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the emerging Data Economy in Europe.

ESTeam is pleased to host a panel at this year's EDF on the topic: Collaborating on Interoperability to Achieve a Single Market
Join us on 19th March at 16:50.

You will meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, in Athens.

EDF Home page

An event to plan proposal submissions under the Horizon 2020 funding programme for research & innovation, to test ideas, network with others, share ideas and experiences and possibly find partners for future joint proposals.
This is an opportunity to meet Commission staff and obtain immediate feedback on ideas for proposals.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, in Luxembourg.

Event homepage

The bi-annual conference takes place this time in Mannheim. The focus topics of the conference hover around Rights, ROI, and Resources:

• Copyright on terminologies
• Economic efficiency of terminology work
• Identifying key performance indicators and ROI
• Ressources for terminology research
• Terminology management and knowledge structures
• Corpus-based terminology work

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at ESTeam, in Mannheim

Conference program

How to Improve Quality in Terminology Resources

Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at ESTeam, discusses quality improvement approaches at this workshop in Lille. For many years we are now collecting terminology resources and storing them in database systems. Now, the terminology world sees large repositories, often covering many languages. But, with the data growth we also often recognise that the quality fails to keep up. Termbase maintainers have difficulties to control the content, are faced with inconsistencies, redundancies and varying quality. Users hesitate to rely on them when writing or translating texts, the acceptance is lost.

Recent developments make it now possible to automatically measure, improve and guarantee an enduring high quality of such resources. Further, by introducing taxonomical methods users add structure and regain control over large collections of terms. Thus the resource remains always valuable and reliable.

Workshop agenda

The Conference aims to evaluate current e-Government policy, governance, management and implementation standards, and to discuss the roadmap for the development of a sustainable European e-Government framework, enabling the global competitiveness of the European Union, within the new financial framework for 2014-2020.

ESTeam is pleased to speak at this conference.
Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO, in Vilnius

Conference programme

The event for patent information professionals – on the programme for this year:

• Discussions on the unitary patent from an information perspective, the new federated patent register for Europe, and the importance of understanding database coverage in legal status searching
• Best practice presentations on legal status searching using legal status data for patent analysis and competitor watch
• Special focus on retrieving data from Italy
• presentations by leading patent searchers from industry on legal status data and its use in decision-making processes

Meet Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, at the event.
Gudrun is chairing the session on Indexing and comparing patent information, across languages and classifications. Join her on Wednesday, 23rd at 12:30.

Conference homepage

More than 4000 researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, industry representatives, young people and politicians are expected in Vilnius. The event will focus on Horizon 2020 – the EU's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation for 2014-2020.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam at the event.

Conference homepage

The META-FORUM 2013 is an international conference on powerful language technologies for the multilingual information society, the data value chain and the information market place. The two special themes of this year's edition of the conference are Big Data Text Analytics and Multilingual Web Services for Multilingual Europe.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam and Chairman of LT-Innovate, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, at the event.

Event homepage

The tekom annual conference together with the tcworld and tekom fair is the largest global event and market place for technical communication.
Conference attendees are employees from industrial, software and service companies with their (current) focus on Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. An ever growing number of visitors from other European countries and overseas add to the flair of the event.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam and Chairman of LT-Innovate as well as Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager of ESTeam, at the LT-Innovate booth (booth 442).

Jochen also speaks in the "LT-Innovate" track: Knowledge Meets Language. Do more with your terminology resources., scheduled for Wednesday, 6th November from 8:45-9:30 in room 2C.

Michael also speaks in the "CHAT2013" track: Enhancing the quality of terminological resources: the LISE tools and platform, scheduled for Thursday, 7th November from 17:15-18:00 in room 6.2.

Michael's presentation abstract: Enhancing the Quality of Terminological Resources
Jochen's presentation abstract: Knowledge Meets Language
tekom / tcworld 2013 home page

I-KNOW is a top-tier international conference in the areas of knowledge management and knowledge computing. Since 2001, i-KNOW has developed into the crystallization point for different disciplines of knowledge computing, such as knowledge discovery, knowledge analysis, knowledge visualization, social computing, mobile computing, context-aware computing.

We are pleased that our presentation Language meets Knowledge – How to Achieve Cross-border Interoperability has been accepted. We are looking forward to actively contribute to i-KNOW 2013. The presentation is part of the i-praxis track. It is scheduled for Wednesday, 4th September at 12 noon in room 12B, "KT Applications in Industry".

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at ESTeam, in Graz.

i-KNOW homepage

The European Data Forum (EDF) 2013 took place from April 9-10, 2013 in Dublin, Ireland. EDF is the annual meeting-point for data practitioners from industry, research, the public-sector and the community, to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the emerging Big Data Economy in Europe. Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, had the pleasure to moderate the Language Technology Panel.

Language technologies are inevitable for adding value to Big Data. They are needed for extracting information and knowledge from textual documents and social media, and for making them accessible across language borders. But they are also required for searching, linking and documenting non linguistic, e.g. numerical or multi media data, through effective metadata. And they are the core of intuitive semantic interfaces to the human consumer of the end products, e.g., through question answering, report generation and summarization. The proposed joint panel by META-NET, LT Innovate and Multilingual Web is a call for action: to further explore the impact of language technologies on big data and to develop a plan – for leveraging big data to big knowledge.

View the complete recording including slides

The Semantic Interoperability Conference 2013 – SEMIC 2013 is going to bring together both the experts driving the practice of semantics and linked data technologies and those who have firsthand experience of implementing these standards in cross-border e-Government applications.

Meet Jochen Hummel CEO of ESTeam and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam at the event. They will be speaking at 14:20: Applying semantics and language technology in TMClass to harmonise trademark registrations

Event homepage

ETUG – European TRADOS User Group – Conference  is a forum for corporate SDL users allowing them to meet other users, exchange their experiences with the SDL tools and get to know other users’ translation workflows and solutions.

Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at ESTeam and Managing Director of Coreon GmbH, an ESTeam spin off, will be presenting Coreon and how it helps to unleash the knowledge in terminological resources.

Coreon home page
Event home page

The 19^th LSP Symposium will be be held from 8-10 July 2013 at the Centre for Translation Studies of the University of Vienna.

ESTeam and LISE project partners will present LISE and speak on terminology workflows, cooperation in terminology work, elevating the quality of terminology resources, legal and legislative taxonomy management and the cooperation of LISE with IATE.

Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at ESTeam, will present the technology behind LISE.

LSP homepage

The EU’s multilingual nature can be an asset for European companies, giving them the tools they need to harness multilingualism as a means of accessing multicultural global markets and gaining a competitive  advantage over their US counterparts, heard participants in this Policy Dialogue, jointly organised by the EPC and the European Academy of Yuste Foundation, and with the kind support of Poliglotti4.eu project.

Jochen Hummel, Chairman of LT Innovate and CEO of ESTeam is quoted in this report, saying that while "… capital could flow freely between EU countries, the same could not be said of information, citing as an example the difficulties of cross-border e-government." And " …it’s not necessarily a translation problem. It’s a problem of processing multilingual information. The control of information and content has changed, shifting from companies to users and from governments to citizens"

European Academy of Yuste Foundation homepage
European Policy Center homepage
Poliglotti4.eu homepage
Full Event Report

Brussels will again be the meeting point for the Language Technology Industry to network, discuss needs, strategies, innovation opportunities and business trends.
The LT-Innovate Summit will bring together Language Technology vendors (speech, translation and intelligent content technologies) and other stakeholders (investors, buyers, integrators, researchers, policy makers).

Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam and Chairman of LT-Innovate welcomes you at the event.

Event homepage

The European Data Forum is the annual meeting-point for data practitioners from industry, research, the public-sector and the community, to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the emerging Big Data Economy in Europe.

Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, is moderating a panel discussion on language technology: Unlocking the Data Treasure Chest.
Language technologies are inevitable for adding value to Big Data. They are needed for extracting information and knowledge from textual documents and social media, and for making them accessible across language borders. But they are also required for searching, linking and documenting non linguistic, e.g. numerical or multi media data, through effective metadata. And they are the core of intuitive semantic interfaces to the human consumer of the end products, e.g., through question answering, report generation and summarization.
Join Gudrun and a round of experts on 10th of April.

Language Technology panel
Event home page

The tekom spring conference is an event which focuses on German speaking regions of Europe. This year’s focus is on Mobile Documentation.

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager, at the event

Event homepage

The Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) brings
together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore
the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both corporate
business leaders and technologists.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO at the event.

Listen to Jochen and Gudrun on Monday, June 3: Language meets Knowledge – how to achieve cross-border interoperability.

ESTeam presentation abstract
Event home page

Last Monday, 4th February, all LISE partners were on their way to Benelux.

The first event took place in Luxembourg: a joint workshop with IATE users from several European institutions (CdT, Court of Auditors, Parliament). Representatives from all LISE work packages teamed up with members from the IATE group to play with, evaluate and discuss LISE technology. ESTeam Tools – the technology in LISE – are now customized and enabled to process IATE data – with more than 11 million terms probably the largest European terminology collection. It turned out that particularly ESTeam Cleanup plays an indispensable role when assuring high quality terminology resources. High quality language resources – crucial in legal practices (LISE’s focus) as well as in the finance, insurance or health care business(es). One participant commented: “automatically spotting errors, misspellings, doublettes, wrong classification attributes … – this is a terminologist’s dream”.

We then all continued to Ghent to meet in the premises of LISE partner CrossLang. The official LISE EMB / TMB meetings carried on throughout Wednesday afternoon. Joeri van de Walle from CrossLang presented us with preliminary results from the IATE workshop, confirming the encouraging feedback from the day before. The final evaluation reports will contain qualitative (via a survey) as well as quantitative figures (via statistical capabilities in the ESTeam Tools). An additional workshop is already planned to take place in Brussels.

On Thursday we had the LISE Advisory Group meeting. Advisors from EMF, Swiss Federal Chancellery, and Infoterm assessed LISE, its technological and economic potential. Since the workshops have already confirmed the users’ needs and the value of the technology, we are now ready to focus on how to exploit and market the LISE value proposition. And, indeed, we are embracing several brilliant suggestions from the advisors on how to proceed.

Fascinating weeks!

LISE homepage

Network Meeting and General Assembly. Current State of Play and Next Steps

The highlights are:

Introducing the META-NET Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020
Official launch of META-SHARE
Taking stock and wrapping up: three years of META-NET
Discussion: next steps and future plans

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO at ESTeam and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO at ESTeam at the event.

Event homepage

Sprachtechnologie heute und morgen: Perspektiven und Strategien
Organised by META-NET, the DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), and GSCL(German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology).

Attend a presentation by Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager at ESTeam about "Language Resources, Machine Translation and Interoperability"
Meet also Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO at ESTeam.

Event homepage

Two entire days on trademarks: keynote speeches, plenary sessions and workshops. General survey of trademark protection and
anti-counterfeiting: strategies, case studies, best practices and ongoing reforms, all IP practitioners need to know. The key topics are:

• Creative brand strategies for max. value & fame
• Important EU reforms under OHIM leadership
• The advanced fight against counterfeiting
• Brands caught in the claws of social media
• Trademarks v. unfair competition dilemma

Conference homepage

Two days of intensive patent debates, with keynotes, plenary sessions and workshops (9 streams). A comprehensive blend of key patent reforms. The key topics are:

• New patent systems & rules harmonization
• Future of IP litigation and ‘Patent Wars’
• Antitrust v. intellectual property cleavage
• Greatest IP deals: behind the scenes
• Patent strategies in emerging countries
• Practical sessions: tying IP to profitability

Conference homepage

Learn about the latest developments in patent information from the EPO.
This year, at the invitation of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, the Patent Information Conference will take place at the Grand Elysée hotel in Hamburg, Germany.

Conference homepage

Packed with innovative panels, case studies and real-world perspectives, SemTechBiz offers one tutorial day and two comprehensive full days of fresh insight and immersive learning from global experts in technology, financial services, healthcare, publishing, search, mobile and enterprise data. An exhibit hall will also showcase the latest tools and solutions across the Semantic and Big Data landscape. Attendees come to SemTechBiz for the practical advice, hands-on guidance and meaningful takeaways that our business luminaries and subject matter veterans bring to the table.

Conference homepage

The London Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) brings together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, at the event.

Conference homepage

On 19 June 2012, over 160 key players of the Language Technology (LT) industry met in Brussels for the first LT-Innovate Summit. The event showcased new technologies in LT, fostered investment opportunities, but most importantly, it successfully conveyed the message that Language Technologies are the missing piece in the puzzle of the EU’s strategy for the Digital Single Market.
Philippe Wacker, Secretary General of LT-Innovate (http://www.lt-innovate.eu), stated: “A multilingual infrastructure is as important for Europe as a broadband infrastructure! Making content produced in any language available to 500 million Europeans is the real opportunity in the decade ahead.”
Jochen Hummel, LT-Innovate Chairman and CEO of ESTeam: “The language infrastructure is an important piece of enabling technology that the EU should procure as soon as possible. It would be a major booster for the European content economy with positive spill-over effects for almost every segment of the economy and society at large.”

Event homepage
Full PR
LT-Innovate homepage

New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

TKE 2012 will be the 10th edition of this conference that started out under the auspices of Infoterm in 1987, and since 1990 has been supported by Infoterm and TermNet. In the course of the years TKE has developed towards wider fields in knowledge transfer for special language communication in a multilingual global society. In this context, interdisciplinary research emphasizing the intersection of different disciplines dealing with terminological aspects and knowledge engineering resources online is welcome. This conference will mainly focus on those theoretical, methodological and practical aspects that show the symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering by highlighting the recent advances in these related fields.

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager, at the event.

TKE 2012 homepage

The LT-Innovate Summit will bring together all major players involved in Language Technology (LT) such as policy makers, vendors and corporates, experts and investors, enhancing the visibility of the fragmented European LT landscape and establishing LT as a key enabling technology for Europe.

Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam and Chairman of LT-Innovate, will be moderating the event. Meet also Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, at the event.

LT-Innovate Summit 2012 homepage

META-FORUM is an international conference on powerful technologies for the multilingual European information society. Highlights:

• Sessions about Europe and its Languages, European Language Technology Industries and Innovation, Language Technologies for Europe 2020, LT Fireworks
• Plans for LT Research and Innovation on the European Level and in Member States and Regions
• META-SHARE: An Open Resource Exchange Facility
• The META Technology Council presents a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe
• META Prize and Seal of Recognition Award Ceremony
• The META-NET White Paper Series
• Invited Keynote Lecture by a representative from Google
• META Exhibition (industry and research project exhibition with booths, software demos and posters)

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, at the forum.

META Forum 2012 homepage

Explore semantic technologies for improved interoperability and e-Government services.
The Semantic Interoperability Conference 2012 – SEMIC 2012 – offers a unique opportunity to explore and discuss how semantic interoperability solutions are being embraced by e-Government initiatives. The conference combines plenary sessions and interactive panels in an inspiring networking atmosphere. e-Government and semantics experts will present their case studies and real-life examples and experiences with semantic technologies.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEOof ESTeam, and Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO of ESTeam, at the event.

SEMIC 2012 homepage

Berlin Buzzwords 2012 is a conference for developers and users of open source software projects, focussing on the issues of scalable search, data-analysis in the cloud and NoSQL-databases. Berlin Buzzwords presents more than 30 talks and presentations of international speakers specific to the three tags "search", "store" and "scale".

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager, at the event.

Berlin buzzwords homepage

Berlin, Töreboda, May 2012 – The European Commission, Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion DG, has signed a 2-year framework contract with ESTeam AB. In order to develop, manage and disseminate the ESCO classification (European skills/competences, qualifications, and occupations), the European Commission requires external expertise to support the development, enhancement, assessment and management of the ESCO taxonomy and other taxonomies.
ESCO’s objective is to develop a multilingual, structured, easy-to-use terminology to describe the most relevant skills, competences and qualifications needed for several thousand occupations. This brings benefits to both jobseekers and employers. For example, it could be used to help jobseekers better describe their skill sets, or to develop new training initiatives adapted to the needs of the labour market and improved career guidance services.

ESTeam is providing expertise on taxonomies, semantic technologies as well as controlled vocabularies and terminological resources.

EURES Portal (basis of the ESCO classification)

Berlin, Töreboda May 2012 – OHIM, the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs), based in Alicante, Spain, has signed a 4-Year framework contract with ESTeam AB. In a continuous effort to improve business processes, OHIM requires and implements high-quality and value-adding services with regard to the usage of domain language in legal decision support scenarios.

With many years of experience in intellectual property matters, ESTeam is delivering linguistic consultancy and development services, such as linguistic text mining and database cleaning, textual information retrieval, multilingual terminology management, resource providing and decision support analysis, tools and systems to OHIM.

OHIM homepage

The Digital Agenda for Europe is the European Union’s roadmap for bringing the benefits of a digital society and economy to Europe’s citizens. But it can only deliver if all stakeholders are involved in assessing problems and identifying solutions. The Assembly consists of an online engagement space launched ahead of the event, 8 workshops on key Digital Agenda topics and a plenary session to report feedback on previous discussions and hold debates on the way forward.

The hashtag of the assembly is #da12.
Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, at the event.

Digital Agenda Assembly homepage

The largest conference for the Apache Lucene/Solr open source search community! Now in its third year – and its fifth conference, the event is hosted by Lucid Imagination, the commercial entity exclusively dedicated to Apache Lucene/Solr enterprise search.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO at the event.

Lucene Revolution 2012 homepage

More than 9,000 intellectual property professionals will convene in Washington, D.C. for INTA’s 2012 Annual Meeting – the premier trademark event for networking, continuing legal education, and committee and client meetings. This year’s Annual Meeting will feature valuable skill-building workshops, industry breakouts,interactive table topics, and trademark law sessions focused on international topics; as well as an exhibition hall boasting nearly 100 exhibitors debuting new products and services to help protect your brand.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO and Gudrun Magnusdóttir, CSO at the event.

INTA 2012 homepage

The bi-annual German speaking event is organized by Deutsche Terminologie-Tag e.V. (DTT). The main topics this year cover the following:

• Managing terminology in companies
• Processes around terminology work
• Terminology circles
• Cooperative terminology work
• Web based terminology databases
• Terminology extraction
• Controlling terminology
• New approaches in terminology management technologies

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager, at the event in Heidelberg.

DTT Symposion announcement
DTT home page

The eighth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) takes place in Istanbul. The aim of LREC is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones.

ESTeam is pleased that its joined paper "Putting together apples and oranges: the LISE tools suite for collaborative terminology work" together with EURAC, Bolzano and the University of Vienna, Vienna has been accepted for the colabTKR workshop, Collaboration in Terminology and Knowledge Representation, scheduled for Tuesday, 22nd May.

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager, at the conference.

LREC homepage
colabTKR Workshop

In a support action the EU is funding the creation of a forum for language technologies (LT) companies. The Language Technology Innovation Forum had its constituting meeting on Jan 27 in Brussels. The forum aims to have hundred members by June this year. On June 20 it will have, adjacent to the META meeting in Brussels, its first General Assembly featuring the award session for the LT biz contest.

The forum is supposed to be driven by industry focusing on SMEs and their needs. Therefore the forum has created an Industrial Advisory Board and a Steering Committee. Initiatives shall be driven through Special Interest Groups. Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, has been elected chairman of the Steering Committee. He is heading the SIG for eGovernment aiming to position LT in the Semantic Layer of the EU’s Interoperability Model. He will also work closely with the forum on developing an Innovation Agenda for the LT industry.

Read more on lt-innovate.eu and follow @LTinnovate, @LangTechNews, and @JochenHummel on Twitter

LT-Innovate homepage

ESTeam was pleased to host the LISE EMB/TMB meetings in its offices in Berlin. On 2nd and 3rd February LISE consortium members from University Vienna, EURAC, the European Union, crosslang, and ESTeam met to review the first 12 months of the project and to plan the next steps and deliverables.

Project coordinator Tanja Wissik started with a status assessment. We particularly tried to identify items that require clarification before the first official project review meeting end of March with the EU project officer. We then listed and discussed upcoming marketing and dissemination activities, concretely the attendance of LISE partners at the IRIS 2012 conference end of February in Salzburg, the LREC in Istanbul and the TKE in Madrid. The last session of the first day was dedicated to the LISE business plan, where I’ve reported on ESTeam’s in-depth research on the terminology market landscape and how LISE could see commercial success.
On the second day Elena Chiocchetti from EURAC reported on their user research progress and about the outcome of interviews with terminology managers in administrations – the survey is still running and also available online. Then we’ve dedicated a lot of time to demonstrate the already fully functional LISE collaboration portal, developed by ESTeam. It was very encouraging to see that the user needs as identified by EURAC matches very well with what has been implemented in the portal. A fascinating project!

LISE homepage

The International Legal Informatics Symposium (IRIS) will take place at the Law Faculty of the University of Salzburg from 23-25 February 2012. Already being in its 14th year, IRIS has been established as the largest and most important academic conference on computers and law in Austria and Central Europe. The leading topic of IRIS2012 is: Transformation of Legal Languages

ESTeam is pleased that its paper had been accepted. Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager will talk about: "LISE Web Service: An Online Collaboration Portal to Facilitate Legal Language Harmonization"

IRIS 2012 homepage
LISE homepage

ESTeam attended the 6th European Ministerial eGovernment Conference, entitled "Borderless eGovernment Services for Europeans" on 17 – 18 November 2011 in the City of Poznań organized by the Polish Presidency of the European Union and the European Commission. The conference, a major event during the Polish Presidency, attracted approximately 900 stakeholders from around the world: ministers from EU member states, officials from national, regional and local administrations, industry representatives, civil society and experts.

The conference focused on three main aspects of eGovernance:

• Policy issues
• Interoperability strategies
• People’s concerns for issues like the impact of eGovernment services, inclusiveness, public value, user empowerment and quality assurance.

Large scale projects such as Peppol were presented and they are due to end in less than one year from now. Regrettably only very few governments are implementing these projects into their infrastructure. The European Commission needs to take a greater responsibility for eGovernment projects that they fund and be the first to put them to use. The needs of the Commission must be considered in these projects since this is the only way that cross border operability will be achieved. The need for cross border services should be implemented by the owner of the problem, namely the organization that crosses EU borders.

Not a lot has happened since the Malmö conference during the last two years. We believe this is due to governments being reluctant to change but rather keep their own operational structure and cost. Furthermore it is apparent that implemented local solutions remain a functional island, missing the potential to be exploited further in other regions – not to mention even other countries. Interoperability and cross border services are fashionable terms in eGovernment but without more actual substance than the plain understanding that the problem is actually there. We are still far away from what to do about the problem.

It is noteworthy that no presented project was close to the scale of Euroclass. Euroclass supports SMEs across Europe to register a trademark in one single step in all EU languages and in any country in a pan European collaborative effort. In such areas progress rather looks slow, while every single step forward is extremely important, since it facilitates the communication between citizens and government as well as having the task to effectively cut the cost and improve the structure of government operations.

Words such as standardization and interoperability are frequently used. Question is how do you standardize in a world with such varied legal and parliamentary systems? Here you must decide to disagree and remember that the insight and knowledge about of where you disagree is also a result of harmonization and interoperability.

ESTeam met many fantastic people from all over Europe with great ideas. The human potential is clearly there for realizing solutions to change old fashioned management and communication methods in European governments.

Conference home page
Peppol home page
Euroclass

Online Information is the largest event dedicated to the information industry, providing an annual meeting place for the global information and information management profession.

Meet Michael Wetzel, Senior Product Manager, at the event.

Event home page

The Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) has had its 20th anniversary this year in Glasgow. Over the years, CIKM developed into a prime meeting venue for all scientists interested in information technologies, from both academia and industry. This year, the conference accepted 137 of the 917 paper submissions it received (a 15% acceptance rate), and established its position as one of the largest and most selective conferences in the field.

In addition to all the academic papers, the Thursday industry session was particularly interesting. Stephen Robertson, one of the key personalities of information retrieval, started the session with an acknowledgement of the needs of professional search, in contrast to the vast majority of research done on web search. He argued that instead of viewing professional search as a specific case, it is the web search that is in fact the exception to the rule. Only in web search do we have a practically unlimited data source, where recall is rendered useless and precision rules. He mentioned legal, prior-art and healthcare search as the prototypical professional search scenarios, which require further attention from the information retrieval community. There were also other interesting talks, in particular that of Khalid Al-Kofahi (Thomson Reuters) describing a new search system for legal search applied to civil law jurisdictions.

Together with the main conference, a total of 15 workshops were organized, to cater to all the different aspects of information sources and uses. Among them, the Patent Information Retrieval (PaIR) workshop (4th edition) was organized by Mihai Lupu, member of ESTeam. PaIR 2011 was equally attended by both industry and academic participants. Among them, we counted Google, Springer and CambridgeIP.

The conference was not all about work and also invited the attendees to a series of social events, starting the night before the conference, with a whiskey distillery tour. It continued on Monday with a welcome reception, on Tuesday with a Civic Reception hosted by the Mayor of the city, and finally a conference banquet on Wednesday, in the stunningly-restored Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

CIKM home page
Patent Information Retrieval Workshop

The Polish Presidency of the European Union (Ministry of the Interior and Administration) and the European Commission are organising in close co-operation the sixth Ministerial eGovernment Conference, entitled "Borderless eGovernment Services for Europeans", on 17 – 18 November 2011 in the City of Poznań.

The conference, a major event during the Polish Presidency, will attract approximately 900 stakeholders from around the world: ministers from EU Member States, officials from national, regional and local administrations, industry representatives, civil society and experts.

Conference web site

In the area of eGovernment, the Polish Government together with the European Commission are hosting the 6th European Ministerial eGovernment Conference and Exhibition "Borderless eGovernment Services for Europeans" in Poznan, 17th -18th November, 2011. This event will be one of the largest and biggest EU events in Poland during the six month period of Polish Presidency, with approximately 800 delegates.

The Pre-Conference is intended to show the results of important European eGovernment research in generating and implementing e-visions and e-solutions, as well as the possibilities to build new strategies upon current results.

Meet Gudrun Magnusdottir, CSO and Jochen Hummel, CEO at the conference.

Conference web site

ESTeam was pleased to host the EU PLuTO meeting in the very picturesque town of Chania in Crete. On 29^th and 30^th September PLuTO consortium members from Dublin City University, CrossLang, and ESTeam met to review the first 18 months of the project and to plan the next steps and deliverables.

We kicked off with a review from the PLuTO project coordinator John Tinsley. He particularly demoed a plug-in that makes patent translations available in web browsers upon a simple mouse-click. Joeri van de Walle from CrossLang then illustrated interesting facts about the quality of the machine translation results: the focus on the patent domain guarantees that PLuTO creates better results than other translation systems. Lambros Kranias from ESTeam proudly presented his research on the encouragingly high number of TM subsegment recycling rate. My presentation on potential strategies on commercialization and productization concluded the first day.

On the second day we’ve split into smaller groups and had several productive workshops spread all across the sunny conference site.

PLuTO homepage

European Master’s in Translation (EMT) is a partnership project between the European Commission and higher-education institutions offering master’s level translation programmes.
This conference will shine a light on various aspects of the future of translation as a profession, such as the influence of the latest IT developments on the profession, the future landscape of languages in the world and economic prospects on the language market.
Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, at the event.

EMT Conference homepage

Europe‘s leading event for professional IP management.

The international trade fair of the IP Service World is an absolute must for all IP professionals and decision makers. You will learn about effective ways of organizing IP management, raising efficiency and reducing costs – without downsizing your IP protection.

Meet Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, at the event.

IP Service World homepage

JEC 2011 brings together translators, users, academic and industrial MT researchers and developers to discuss issues that are most important in real world industrial settings and applications involving MT, but currently under-represented in research circles.
Meet Gudrun Magnusdóttir, founder of ESTeam, at the event.

CNGL Workshop Homepage