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European Language Data Space

ALT-EDIC

Digital infrastructure
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Alliance for Language Technologies EDIC

Preserving linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe and promoting technological excellence and leadership

Workshop on the linguistic and cultural evaluation of large language models

On 11 December 2024, the European Commission is organising, in collaboration with ALT-EDIC and the European Language Data Space, an expert workshop on the linguistic and cultural evaluation of large language models (LLMs), with the purpose of charting current activities in Europe and working towards a common approach. In this workshop, the participating research or industrial groups present their activities, challenges and datasets, focussing on how they would imagine a joint approach.

If you work on relevant topics and want to share your insights, you are welcome to join!

Find more info and register
LLM Workshop
Picture: © Freepik

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

  • Seventeen Members States: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain;
  • Eight observing Member States: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Malta, Portugal, Romania, and Slovakia.

The role of ALT-EDIC is to create a common European data infrastructure and services for language technologies in order to strengthen Europe's technological competitiveness while supporting its cultural diversity. ALT-EDIC's primary action involves collecting and federating language and multimodal data from across the European Union and its Member States. The consolidation of this language data will enable ALT-EDIC to foster the development of innovative Large Language Models with robust multilingual and multimodal capabilities.

Specifically, ALT-EDIC shall carry out the following activities:

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.

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