Language diversity and implications for Language technology in the Multilingual Europe

摘要

Europe has a particular and unique setting. On one had it has a great language diversity, there are twenty four official languages and a dozen of minority languages largely used. On the other hand most of these languages belong to one of the indo-European language families (Roman, Germanic Slavic) and within these language families similarities at lexical and syntactic level can be observed. Whilst an increased attention have been given to the development of language technology tools for the official EU -Languages, processing tools for minority languages have a chance to progress only by exploiting similarities within their language families.