Preserving linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe and promoting technological excellence and leadership
A European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC) is a new mechanism for multi-country projects created under the Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030. EDICs allow Member States to pool funding and other resources in a flexible and efficient way, to invest in transformative digital projects. EDICs can also ensure common standards and interoperability.
For more information on what an EDIC is and what its main features are, please have a look at our News section.
The Alliance for Language Technologies
The ALT-EDIC, the Alliance for Language Technologies, was proposed in December 2023 as one of the first EDICs. On 7 February 2024, the European Commission officially set up the ALT-EDIC with the Implementing Decision (EU) 2024/458.
Coordinated by France, the ALT-EDIC counts
- Twelve Members States: Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia and Spain;
- Seven observing Member States: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Malta, Romania and Slovakia.
The mission of the ALT-EDIC is to develop a common European infrastructure in Language Technologies, focussing particularly on Large Language Models. It seeks to improve European competitiveness, increase the availability of European language data and uphold Europe’s linguistic diversity and cultural richness.
The ALT-EDIC’s action plan focuses on five thematic areas:
develop a central platform for European language resources and collect high-quality data sets, building on the Language Data Space. Creating strategic data for low-resource languages will be a particular focus.
gather open-source models, fine-tune, reduce and optimise them for use in European SMEs, and provide methodologies for their evaluation, certification and normalisation.
launch new open-source models (including models with multimodal capabilities), efficiently coordinate access to EuroHPC computers for EU companies and industries, and provide support to public and private experts to develop new models.
provide methodologies to address potential discrimination and bias introduced by natural language processing.
develop a start-up incubator for businesses participating in the EDIC, promote links between industry and research, act as a key player of the European coordinated plan on AI, bring together and strengthen the LT community, provide dedicated support to institutions for investing in LT, and develop cultural programmes based on AI for language.
What is the link between the ALT-EDIC and LDS?
The ALT-EDIC is a multi-country project, run and funded by the Member States who have agreed to join it. By pooling resources, the members should achieve the critical mass of data and other resources needed to create and finetune Large Language Models, which any single member would find difficult to do alone.
The LDS is one of several data spaces, supported by the Commission to nurture a data ecosystem across many sectors. The LDS will establish a governance structure for the exchange of data from various sectors, that can be used to develop language technology tools. This data will also be available to the ALT-EDIC. The LDS is financed by a contract under the Digital programme.