Galician, Catalan, Basque and Valencian collaborate from PERTE 'New Economy of Language' to gain a foothold in society and the digital economy

The Fontán Building of the City of Culture is hosting between Thursday 13 and Friday 14 July the first meeting in Galicia of the NEL (New Economy of Language) initiative, the Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE) focused on the new economy of language promoted by the Government of Spain, within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. The State's proposal aims to boost the new digital economy based on natural language, taking advantage of the potential of all its languages as a factor for economic growth and international competitiveness in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), translation, teaching, cultural production and dissemination and, in general, research and science.

NEL is a common and coordinated project, whose ultimate goal is the development of multilingual resources; in particular, the creation of multilingual text, voice and machine translation models that can respond to the needs of social reality and are in line with current technology, in which multilingualism and language transfer play a crucial role.

The participation in this common project is articulated from the different sub-projects related to the language spread throughout different parts of the national geography. Thus, the Galician language is represented by the figure NEL NÓS, a formula based on the 'Nós' research project (entrusted to the USC by the Xunta de Galicia, and developed through CiTIUS and ILG); Basque, by NEL GAITU (from the project of the same name developed at the University of the Basque Country); NEL AINA in the case of Catalan (underway at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center); and NEL VIVES, the nomenclature of the project on which the University of Alicante is already working.

All of them are participating today and tomorrow in a meeting in Santiago, which brings together some thirty people from the different institutions involved. The meeting is taking place in the Fontán Building (Cidade da Cultura de Galicia), headquarters of the Nós Project, and Manuel González Bedia, director general of the Office of the Commissioner for the New Language Economy, is also taking part: "on the digital level, the union of all languages is a benefit for everyone", he said this morning. "Working together means economy of scale: each of the ingredients benefits from being collectively in tune with the other; this seems to us to be very important, both politically and technically," he explained. González Bedia was also optimistic about future funding scenarios, saying that "even if the financial instruments change and funds are not allocated with the label of 'official languages', other actions could revert to this project, such as chairs or networks of excellence in Artificial Intelligence, since all of them have specific allocations for language technologies".

The deputy director of HiTZ Zentroa (Basque Language Technology Centre), German Rigau, explained today in a very graphic way the importance of taking advantage of the current window of opportunity in the field of language technologies "there are things that evolve slowly, but from time to time revolutions also appear, as is happening now with ChatGPT". "When the paradigm changes, the technologies have to change too; there is a lot of technology for English, but not for Basque, not for Catalan or Galician, nor for many other languages in Europe... and if we don't have technology for these languages, people will end up using the tools they have at their disposal: if you have a ChatGPT in English or Spanish that works great, you will use it, but if you want to use it in Basque and it doesn't understand you, no".

For his part, Manuel Palomar, director of the Digital Intelligence Centre (CENID) in Alicante, wanted to highlight the alliance of the different institutions involved: "a project of these characteristics is essential to promote the languages of Spain and avoid digital exclusion, which is currently at risk; a consortium with the main centres of Galicia, the Basque Country, Catalonia and the Valencian Community benefits us all".

Marta Villegas, head of the Language Technologies Unit at the BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center), was of the same opinion, stating that "what the NEL project guarantees, and this is very good, is that we have reached an agreement and aligned the different languages in Spain; we can share resources, strategies, methods... and so the final result will be much better. The strategy we have followed will undoubtedly guarantee much greater success than we would have had without the project, or even with the project, but without coordination", she said.

Regarding the situation of Galician, the director of the Instituto da Lingua Galega (ILG), Elisa Fernández Rei, reflected on the crucial role of PERTE: "according to the latest report published in the European Language Equality project, Galician is practically at the back of the European languages, even taking into account the non-official ones. A project like this is a fundamental boost to be able to contribute with linguistic resources and new technologies to the improvement of the situation of Galician, and to put it in a situation of real use, in the applications we use every day".

Finally, Senén Barro reflected today on the importance of PERTE for the development of the Nós Project. For the scientific director of CiTIUS: "we are one of the most technologically depressed languages in Europe, and this is not simply a question of being up to date or not, but it has strong economic repercussions, and even affects the survival of our language. Collaborating with other communities that are developing projects equivalent to the Nós project in their respective languages will allow us to go further, better and faster".

In addition, he also wanted to highlight the relevance that PERTE has for the CiTIUS (Singular Research Centre on Intelligent Technologies of the USC): "The CiTIUS, besides being the Galician research centre specialised in artificial intelligence, has in language technologies one of its most important areas of research and transfer. This is important for the centre, but also for Galicia, as these technologies are among the most important and impactful in the field of AI, something that is obvious just thinking about ChatGPT. Participating in the most important research project in language technologies of all those being developed in Spain is a unique opportunity to continue expanding our potential in this field, helping the technological advancement of Galician, and that of all the languages of Spain. It is a source of pride and a great responsibility".