Denmark in Europe: Benchmarking HLT Research & Development

1. Denmark in Europe: Benchmarking HLT Research & Development EUROMAP National Seminar - Copenhagen 30 April 2003 Rose Lockwood Director of Research, Bowne Global Solutions

2. The EUROMAP Final Report: Benchmarking HLT Progress COVERING: • State-of-the-Art in HLT • The Shape and Evolution of the Market • Driving Next-Generation HLT: Policy Imperatives • The HLT Scorecard • HLT Benchmark • HLT Opportunity Index • Conclusions & Recommendations

3. State-of-the-Art in HLT • What is HLT and who are the companies making it happen? • Segmentation of the technologies • Introduction to applications and opportunities for technology transfer • Review of types of HLT players in Europe • Snap-shot profiles illustrative of the rich HLT scene in Europe • Comprehensive directory of European researchers and suppliers (to be published separately) • Showing focus and types of applications • Languages covered by tools and products

4. Multimodal, Multilingual Products & Services X-Lingual Applications Interface & Interaction Knowledge Processing componentware SPEECH NLP From components to complex solutions: the focus of HLT applications

5. Grounded in the basics: suppliers of Componentware and Resources • Neurosoft (Greece) – Greek language components for text mining • Polderland Language & Speech Technology (Netherlands) - Core components for multiple languages • Connexor (Finland) – Embedded multilingual language analysers • Daedalus (Spain) - Document processing tools for Castilian

6. Innovators - Interface and Interaction • Telisma (France) – Speech recognition for telecommunications voice services • Auralog (France) Speech technology for the language learning industry • Sympalog (Germany) – State-of-the-art voice dialog systems • Loquendo (Italy): A global speech technology powerhouse • Rhetorical Systems (UK) - High quality speech synthesis in multiple languages

7. Innovators in Cross-Lingual Applications • ESTeam (Sweden) - Resource-driven translation automation • Sail Labs Technology (Austria) - An advanced language understanding agenda • Synthema (Italy) – Tools for multilingual knowledge management • Systran (France) – Industrial-strength machine translation • Aixplain (Germany) – Cross-lingual solutions for speech and text

8. Innovators in HLT-based Knowledge Processing • Ankiro (Denmark) – User-centric dialogue and knowledge robots • Language & Computing (Belgium) - Semantics for medical knowledge • Xtramind Technologies (Germany) – Intelligent enterprise information processing • Knowledge Concepts (Netherlands) - Boosting cross-lingual access to corporate content • Wordmap (UK) – Enterprise Taxonomy Management Systems

9. Ankiro - Products based on (English) language tools and databases • Advanced products that promote effective communication, information searching and knowledge management. • Dialog robots used for: • Guidance (e.g. as guides on web sites) • Support (e.g. as Call centre robots and FAQ robots) • Entertainment (e.g. chat robots) • Search engines and crawlers include: • Web search engines (available both as index based search and as full-text search) • Site search engines (searches on a company's web page) • Intranet search engines (searches through all of a company's databases) • Lotus search engines (plug-ins for effective searches in Lotus applications)

10. 2nd Generation LangTech: Advanced Solutions Crossing the Chasm with Language Technology embedded solutions niche products components Market Take-up Original Chart Source: Geoffrey Moore, The Chasm Group

11. Market Forecast: Speech and Language Applications TOTAL HLT product market circa $2B in 2004 CAGR 21% 1600 50% 1400 40% Total revenues 1200 language Year on year growth 30% 1000 speech Revenues ($m) Year on year growth (%) 20% 800 600 10% 400 0% 200 0 -10% 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 Source: Datamonitor, Voice Business Quarterly Update (Q3 2002) Source: Steve McClure, IDC (2002)

12. Policy - Background and Evolution • How important is HLT from a policy perspective? • How has public investment supported the domain, and • Who are the Showcase Labs? • How has public-sector investment in HLT evolved over the years? • National and EU programme timelines

13. New tech-transfer cycle based on advanced HLT Research embedded solutions niche products components basic research Funding for 1st Generation LangTech 1982 1990 1995 2000 2002 Advanced LangTech 2003 FP6 and new national, regional programmes Programme Support and HLT Transfer to Market

14. Are we ready for the next generation?Benchmarking HLT in Europe Demand-side Factors Technology Development Supply-side Factors

15. Benchmarking Method • Measuring HLT maturity: • Factors include research and tech-transfer record, rates-of-investment (at national level, both public and private), breadth of language coverage • Measuring HLT opportunity: • Factors include infrastructure and business environment • Combining data from varied sources to establish a useful benchmarking scale • HCID/World Economic Forum survey - uses a 1-to-7 rating scale (1=poor, 7=excellent) for a wide range of questions • Other studies normalised to this scale (Innovation Scorecard, EITO ICT infrastructure data, EuroStat, OECD, EUROMAP HLT maturity, etc.)

16. How to measure HLT maturity • Expert opinion/knowledge of the research scene • Review of activities, actors, players: • suppliers • projects • researchers • Review of quasi-quantitative measures including • projects-per-country (based on hltcentral database and other sources for pre-FP4/5 programmes) • experts/individuals with HLT focus per country (based on CDB and ELSNET contacts list) • “citations” per country - from proceedings of major HLT conferences (EACL, ACL, COLING, MT Summit, Applied ACL, TMI, CLAW, Eurospeech, ICSLP, LREC)

17. PROMISING Netherlands Sweden Germany Finland UK Denmark Ireland France READY FOR TAKE- OFF Austria STRUCTURAL LIMITS Belgium Spain Italy Portugal Greece Consolidated Results: HLT Benchmark + Opportunity = HLT Scorecard LEADERS HLT Opportunity EU-14 HLT Benchmark

18. Key Findings: Denmark

19. Key Findings: Denmark vs EU average

20. HLT Indexes: Denmark EU Average HLT RTD & Tech Transfer HLT RTD Investment HLT Language Breadth

21. Scorecard: Comparing Denmark to EU Leaders

22. Denmark: Key Findings • Denmark scores to the EU average on measures of robustness in HLT research • Strong tradition of text and NLP applications, and speech research is well represented. • Active professional translation community, including a dedicated machine translation system for processing patent documents between English and Danish. • Five major HLT research centres, one of which acts as a national centre of excellence for language technology. • Denmark has about seven HLT suppliers, though not all of them are dedicated language-technology focused companies

23. Denmark: Strengths • Traditionally export-focused country with strong multilingual capabilities • Excellent cross-border facilitator • Well-trained R&D base in language and speech technology • Strong EU project participation, and a leading role in regional Nordic language technology activities • Healthy business innovation environment and excellent levels of public infrastructure readiness • Basic technology components for Danish now exist, and research is carried out on other languages.

24. Denmark: Challenges • Ensuring that the Danish language community can benefit from speech and language technologies appropriate to Denmark’s high degree of readiness • Industry involvement in HLT research is scarce, tech-transfer weak • Lack of large-scale high technology channels that can facilitate the transfer of language and speech technologies to market • Small local market opportunity • While 95% of the population are Danish speaking, the language is highly localised, and not used widely elsewhere • The transfer of first generation language technology to the marketplace is still in waiting mode

25. Guide to Action Strong correlation between Opportunity and HLT Benchmark World-Class knowledge-based products and services DE/NE/FI/UK SV/DK Role for stronger HLT RTD and tech-transfer to match opportunities Boosting HLT research will pay off due to market potential HLT Opportunity IE/IT/AT EU-14 HLT lagging due to constraints of the environment and under-investment in R&D FR/BE/ES Strong exploitation potential: tech-transfer support key Infrastructure, investment and national policy support urgently needed GR/PT HLT Benchmark

26. General Recommendations EU-level • Collaboration at national level: HLT in the ERA • Structures for visioneering • Digital Infrastructure for HLT • “Infrastructure Funds” for language technology Danish national level • Need for a continued focus on cross-border collaboration to ensure the future vitality of the Danish HLT community • within the Nordic Region, and in the wider European context. • Greater effort at transfer opportunities • high Internet penetration and networked educational system • e-government, education and training may provide new opportunities for exploiting language technology in an inherently small market.

27. Thanks! Rose Lockwood Director of Research, Bowne Global Solutions Cambridge +44 1223 350 340 rose.lockwood@equipe.co.uk