A recently completed Insight project from the Natural Language Processing team in Insight at the University of Galway has been written up on the European Commission’s CORDIS website. You can read an extract and click through to the full article below.

“Language technologies play an important role in breaking down language barriers, promoting multiculturalism and making Europe’s digital decade accessible for all. These technologies rely on large amounts of data, and with better access and usage of language resources, they can also provide multilingual solutions that will support the emerging Digital Single Market in Europe. However, language technology specialists spend around 80 % of their time cleaning, organising and collecting data sets because data is not ‘ready to use’.

Extract-transform-load process, which involves linking data sets to existing designs, has the potential to reduce this effort. However, the technology remains unexploited. This is where the EU-funded Pret-a-LLOD project comes in.

“We aimed to combine linked data technologies with natural language processing (NLP) techniques to increase the availability of language technologies for individuals and enterprises in Europe,” explains project coordinator, Insight’s Dr John McCrae.

The use of linked data technologies allows data to be more easily shared and managed on the web and thus increases the availability and accessibility of data. “In this way, the project is similar to the goals of the FAIR initiative to increase the usefulness of data,” notes McCrae.”

You can read more about this research here.