“Bridging the technology gap: Integrating Malta into European Research and Innovation efforts for AI-based language technologies”

Following European Parliament's Report on Language equality in the digital age, Language-centric artificial intelligence offers new opportunities for digital and technology-enabled communication and products in all European languages (and beyond), and thus both economically and cultural, are a central cornerstone for the European Digital Single Market and inclusion of citizens.

However, although smaller or minority languages like Maltese are the ones to gain most from language technologies (LT), tools and resources for them are often scarce in some cases non-existent which leads to a widening technology gap between large, well-resourced languages and smaller languages like Maltese.

The overall goal of the ""LT-BRIDGE"" project hence is to integrate University of Malta's AI Department and Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology into the European research community in the area of AI-based language technologies by significantly strengthening its the research and networking capacities and reputation aiming to create a European-level Centre of Excellence in the this field in Malta (Widening Country) and thus closing the technology gap.

Two leading European research organizations, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Dublin City University's ADAPT Centre (DCU) will work in order to help UM to attain this objective.

The Science Strategy and corresponding research and innovation programme proposed by the LT-BRIDGE consortium will address the carefully selected and mutually-relevant research topics jointly shaping important new applied research areas.

As a result the project will foster new young European level research teams in UM capable of carrying out competitive research in the priority scientific areas.

The Innovation and Research Management capacity building programmes will allow UM to extend and improve its portfolio of services oriented towards the needs of national, regional and European public authorities, businesses and NGOs, as well.