"Multilingual challenges for accessing digitized culture online". Presentation at the Riga Summit on the Multilingual Digital Single Market, April 27-29 2015. http://www.rigasummit2015.eu/

1. Multilingual challenges
for accessing digitized culture online
Antoine Isaac
Multilingual Digital Single Market Riga Summit, 28 April 2015

2. Europe’s platform to access cultural heritage
42M objects
and counting

3. Built on metadata from a broad network
Museums
National Aggregators
Regional
AggregatorsArchives
Thematic projects
Libraries
Musées
Lausannois
Culture.fr
The European
Library
APEX
LinkedHeritage Europeana Fashion
2,300 museums, archives and libraries

4. A platform for access and re-use

5. Data from all over EU
top 16
Items from 36 countries
Metadata in 33 languages

6. Data from all over EU

7. (Re-)users from all over EU
Portal in 31 languages
Data access from anywhere

8. Diversity of domains makes it hard
 Data is heterogeneous
 Makes it harder to train tools

9. Diversity of applications makes it harder
 Display
 Search
 Data services
….

10. Some issues for applying language
technology for online culture
 Typical queries are very short
 Identification of query language is not easy, even
manually
 Plenty of named entities (persons, places…)
Studies by Humboldt University on Europeana and The European Library
http://www.clef-initiative.eu/documents/71612/86374/CLEF2010wn-LogCLEF-StillerEt2010.pdf

11. Progress and issues – data enrichment

12. Problems of multilingual enrichment

13. Problems of multilingual enrichment
Poisonous India or the Importance of a Semantic and
Multilingual Enrichment Strategy
Marlies Olensky, Juliane Stiller, Evelyn Dröge, MTSR 2012
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-
35233-1_25

14. Exploiting multilingual data from partners

15. Problems need pooling resources
 From cultural heritage sector
 From language technology industry
 EU level: Horizon2020 projects, DSIs
• MT@EU
 National level
• Cooperation Tilde & Latvian Ministry of Culture

16. Being open
 Open source and open data, as much as possible!
 Sharing the word about problems and solutions
EuropeanaTech Insight first issue on multilingualism

17. Thank you!
Antoine Isaac
antoine.isaac@europeana.eu
@EuropeanaEU