The Secretariat of State for the Information Society and the Digital Agenda in Spain has organised an InfoDay on Language Technologies and Machine Translation in Madrid, last April 25.

The Ministry has used this event to promote language technologies among actors from different domains (researchers, industry and public administrations) and to present the opportunities for the public purchase of innovation that have just been announced by the Spanish Government. This event allowed participants to analyse and discuss what language technologies may offer in the development of the Information Technology industry in Spain. This follows upon the Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology that was published in October 2015 (https://plantl.mineco.gob.es/tecnologias-lenguaje/PTL/Paginas/plan-impulso-tecnologias-lenguaje.aspx).

The event was introduced by the Secretary of State José María Lassalle and it was organised around a series of presentations and panels, with a morning devoted to implementations and existing means and tools from the LT Plan, elaborating on the Ministry's instruments to support language technolgies and on existing and potential developments of the field. Victoria Arranz represented ELRA in the round table about Initiatives and European Networks. The afternoon introduced the language technology use cases, with presentations from representatives of Turism, Health and Sectorial Surveillance in Spain. These presentations gave the audience the opportunity to discuss the large number of applications that LT can have in such different areas and their impact for the industry behind them.

The detailed programme of the event, including links to the presentations, is available from the link in the right column.