ESTeam

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

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

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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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