David Pérez Fernández
Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism
Biography
David Pérez is currently advisor of the Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Information Society inside Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism (Spanish Government).
Spanish Plan for the Impulse of Language Technologies
The Plan to promote language technologies (LT-Plan) aims to encourage industrial sector development of natural language processing and machine translation in Spanish and regional languages.
The LT-Plan establishes measures to increase the number, quality and availability of language infrastructures (Spanish and co-official languages), boost language industry by knowledge transfer from research sector and incorporate Public Administration as a driver of natural language processing and machine translation sector.
The Plan aims to improve language technologies in a coordinated manner, seeking synergies and avoiding duplication of efforts, in accordance with the recommendations of the Commission for the Reform of Public Administration (CORA). LT-Plan is structured into four main areas:
Area I: Support for the development of linguistic infrastructure.
This work area aims to facilitate the development of processors (entities recognizers, taggers, semantic similarity measures, etc.) and linguistic resources(parallel corpora for machine translation, dictionaries, taxonomies, etc.) that serve as fuel for the development of the processing industry Spanish natural language and machine translation.
Area II: Promotion of Language Technology Industry.
The second area corresponds to the objective of supporting the transfer of knowledge between research sector and industry, as well as to promote internationalization of companies and institutions that belong to Language Technology sector.
Area III: Public Administration as a driver of the Language Industry.
It's proposed the creation of open common platforms for language processing and machine translation to accelerate Public Administration and Industry technology adoption. In addition, public policy of open data on public sector information (named RISP in Spain) represents a channel for the development of important linguistic resources (named entities, toponyms, parallel corpora, etc.).
Area IV: Lighthouse projects based on language technologies.
Fourth area is oriented to promotion of the lighthouse projects, based on application of technology of natural language, initially undertaken by the government in strategic sectors (Health, Education, Tourism, etc.). LT-Plan is open to public private initiatives
This projects are intended as a demonstration of language technology capabilities and benefits, generating industry and creating reusable resources for industrial application. They also serve as real scenery for learning and improve future developments.