Press release

ElkarOla: strategic research in
language and speech technologies

• The strategic research project has focused on practical solutions for the RIS3 areas of the Basque Government

• Three demos have been developed: a dialogue agent for customer service in the territorial area; a search engine for health terms and relations for the area of biosciences and health; and an expert/employee teleassistance system for the area of advanced manufacturing that works in real time.

Usurbil, 19 June 2017

The results of the ElkarOla research project were presented today at the Elhuyar headquarters in Usurbil. The research was carried out by a consortium formed by the VICOMTECH-IK4 and TECNALIA technology centres, the Aholkularitza and IXA research groups of the UPV/EHU and Elhuyar for two years (2015-2016), subsidized by the Department of Economic Development and Infrastructure of the Basque Government and sponsored by Culture and Politics.

From left to right: Igor Leturia, Iosu Madariaga, Estibaliz Arlkorta and Jozu Aztiria

The research area of the ElkarOla project is language and speech technologies: tools for translation (machine translation, translation memories...), information management (search engines, information extraction, sentiment analysis...), language resources (dictionaries, corpus, proofreaders...) and speech tools (speech knowledge, speech creation...). The project focuses mainly on Basque, but also on other languages of the environment.

In ElkarOla, in addition to basic research, applied research is also carried out, technology transfer is given importance and tools can be socialized and/or marketed. He has worked in the fields of application of advanced manufacturing, biosciences and health and territory (language industry, tourism, culture, education...), emphasizing the RIS3 areas of the Basque Government.

Another objective of ElkarOla is to generate knowledge and a qualified critical mass that allows to face autonomously the future of R&D&i in this strategic line. For this purpose, training courses, postgraduate master's degrees, specialized seminars and doctoral courses are organized in the field of language and speech technologies. In addition, to achieve the objectives of the project, the members of the project consortium have a scientific and research community, with a necessary critical mass and an international reputation, as well as preferential relationships with numerous application companies.

As a sample of the possible applications of the technologies worked in the project, three demos have been developed that have been presented at a press conference.

A dialogue agent has been developed for customer service in the territorial area. Customer service is a key element in providing quality service in some sectors, but many of these services have low-value repetitive tasks or phases (user identification, form completion, simple queries…). Dialogue system technologies, along with natural language processing and artificial intelligence, allow this type of task to be automated so that technicians can use time more efficiently. The demo is a dialogue system integrated into a web interface in which natural language processing techniques and statistical classification algorithms are used to identify the user and which department the event described by the user should be directed to. System responses are given by both text and speech synthesis and commands can be given both written and verbal.

The biosciences and health demo is a search engine for health terms and relationships. This first prototype of a search engine for relationships between medical entities (diseases and medicines) works on a corpus of extracts of scientific articles in Spanish on medical subjects. This corpus has been labeled manually to train and evaluate an automatic detection system for adverse drug reactions. Labeled entities include, on the one hand, generic drugs, drug brands and substances and, on the other, diseases and symptoms. Labeled relationships include causes (what causes the disease) and treatments (what medicine the disease is treated with). In the search engine you can perform searches by entities or relationships and graphically view the entities and relationships detected in each document.

The demo in the field of advanced manufacturing is an augmented reality teleassistance system for use between an expert and an operator. This demo demonstrates how language and speech technologies can contribute in a noisy industrial environment. If the operator wants to have his hands free to work, he will put some smartglass or have at his disposal a tablet. The expert will help you remotely through another tablet or computer. The expert will receive in real time what the employee indicates and what he sees with his tablet or glasses. Thus, the expert will verbally inform the worker, but since the worker can find himself in a noisy environment caused by the machines, the system automatically transcribes (by speaking knowledge) and translates (by machine translation) these instructions so that it arrives in writing to the worker. This text will be shown to the employee on your device, in real time, about what you are seeing and guided step by step in your task. In addition, the app will show the augmented reality worker the remote instructions, using arrows and the like.

Prior to the ElkarOla project, the consortium of 5 agents participated in the Ber2Tek (2012-2014) and BerbaTek (2009-2011) projects, and conducted three more demos. Previously worked together on the Anhitz project between 2006 and 2008 and prepared the demo of a virtual scientific expert. The Hizking XXI project was carried out in 2002-2004.

To give all the explanations about the ElkarOla project and present the demos, four people participated this morning in the appearance held at the headquarters of Elhuyar in Usurbil:

• Josu Aztiria Urtaran, head of the Language and Technology unit at Elhuyar
• Estibaliz Alkorta Barragán, Director of Basque Promotion of the Department of Culture and Linguistic Policy of the Basque Government
• Iosu Madariaga Garamendi, Director of Technology and Strategy, Department of Economic Development and Infrastructure of the Basque Government
• Igor Leturia Azkarate, Elhuyar Speaker Technology Manager and ElkarOla Project Coordinator

As explained by JosuAztiria, ElkarOla has been a two-year project, but it is the penultimate step in research initiated in 2002 with a broad vision. He has mentioned three reasons to explain this vision. On the one hand, he said that 15 years ago he was able to “design and execute a long-term project on key linguistic technologies for the development of our economy and the digital sustainability of Basque”. On the other hand, he stressed that from the Basque wells it was decided to jump to the new wells of industry and innovation, which were related to language and Basque, but which were technology of industry and innovation. Third, he said they were able to base the project on the community to complement the experience and knowledge of the consortium members. On the other hand, Aztiria said that in Europe there is a desire to strengthen the economic sector linked to language technologies, since “in addition to being a source of growth and qualified employment, it is able to respond to the language barrier, multilingual Europe and numerous social challenges. We want to be the most important reference pole in Europe, and we want to bring Basque to the digital development that the rest of European state languages have.”

Estibaliz Alkorta said: “The Department of Culture and Linguistic Policy of the Basque Government makes a great effort to promote Basque in ICT and annually subsidizes attractive projects. Just as it is essential to promote Basque in education, in the world of work or in free time, it is essential that new technologies also make way for our language, since this area is intimately linked to the rest. We would like to thank the work done to integrate Basque into new technologies through projects such as ElkarOla”.

Iosu Madariaga congratulated the consortium for the work done to date and expressed its full adherence to the lines of work of the research project ElkarOla, of the Department of Economic Development and Infrastructure, and in particular of the Directorate of Technology and Strategy. At the end of his speech, Madariaga has also given a premiere, as the 2017 Association has directly communicated the resolution of the subsidies. He said that “we have just approved that the research project ElkarOla, BerbaOla, be subsidized in 2017”.

Finally, Igor Leturia has presented the 3 demos, which hope to “carry out and market without delay the results of this research project in real applications”.

Article about ElkarOla (in Basque) at www.aldizkaria. elhuyar.eu

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