The project entitled Alliance for Language Technologies for the European Union (ALT-EDIC4EU) has been selected by the European Commission for funding under the Digital Europe Programme.
With a total EU funding of 4 M€ for 9 partners coordinated by the ALT-EDIC, the project will support the ALT-EDIC’s strategy to co-construct the European Language Technology ecosystem and co-develop its robust and scalable infrastructure.
This project will contribute to ALT-EDIC’s construction and consolidation phase, starting with the recruitment of its staff. Then, through the coordination of Member States efforts, ALT-EDIC4EU will contribute to preserve linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe, while effectively implementing the European Common Data Infrastructure and Service multi-country project objectives in the area of language technologies.
The project is expected to start early 2025. Further information is available here.
Lithuania is represented in the ALT-EDIC consortium by the Ministry of Culture, a governmental institution responsible for formulating and implementing state cultural policies in the fields of professional and amateur arts, theatre, music, fine arts, cinema, museums, libraries, publishing, copyright and related rights, and the protection of cultural heritage and language.
In response to recent advances in generative AI, Lithuania is actively exploring the development of large language models (LLMs) and supporting the ecosystem for the Lithuanian language. The Ministry of Culture has initiated an information campaign to engage both public and private sector organisations in ALT-EDIC efforts. Several companies have already expressed their interest. Lithuania is also funding a number of projects through Recovery and Resilience Facility (Next Generation Lithuania), aimed at accumulating language resources for AI systems. It is anticipated that these projects will complement the goals of ALT-EDIC.