ELRA participated in the STOA Workshop: Language equality in the digital age - Towards a Human Language Project, held at the European Parliament in Brussels on January 10, 2017.

Chaired by Lituanian MEP Algirdas Saudargas, the workshop's objective was to tackle the multilingual and multicutural challenges in Europe today.

The current status and trends of Human Language Technologies (HLT) and the specificities and challenges of the European HLT sector were reviewed. The economic impact of language barriers in Europe and the social implications of imbalanced level of technological support for all European languages were also covered. Finally the workshop addressed the implementation of policies meant to effectively tap the potential of these technologies in order to achieve a fully integrated European.

The workshop was concluded by an interactive session. Khalid Choukri, ELRA Secretary General, brought up the issue of LRs availability, from both technical and legal perspectives, and advocated for a "fair-use" of  LRs for research, in the same way this is done in the US and in Asia (see his full statement in the video below from 2:40:53 on).