Cross-Lingual Knowledge Extraction Project Launched at Bled

Bled, 20 January (STA) - XLike, an ambitious project aimed at developing

technology to monitor and aggregate knowledge that is currently spread

across global mainstream and social media and at enabling cross-lingual

services, was launched with a three-day meeting at Bled that concluded on

Friday.

Featuring Ljubljana-based Jožef Stefan Institute (IJS) as the

coordinator, research institutes from Germany, Spain, Croatia and China, as

well the Slovenian Press Agency (STA) and contributions from Bloomberg and

The New York Times, the three-year project is estimated at almost EUR 5m,

EUR 3.5m of which is to come from EU funds.

The idea is to combine

scientific insights for a breakthrough in the area of machine-based

cross-lingual text understanding, including for the needs of media, the

head of the project Marko Grobelnik, who works in the IJS artificial

intelligence lab, told the STA.

The project, detailed information on

which is available at www.xlike.org,

will draw on the latest findings in computational linguistics, machine

learning, text mining and semantic technologies.

The software

solutions envisaged would for instance enable the connecting of reports by

individual media with similar reports on related subject in any language.

The detection of plagiarism could be one of the applications.

Also a

goal is fast detection of new events via announcements in different

languages on the internet. This would give editors a tool for identifying

new developments, such as spontaneously organised protests, at an early

stage.

The project will focus on six languages - English, German,

Spanish and Chinese as major languages, and Catalan and Slovenian as

smaller languages.

The basic messages of texts will however be

attainable in more than 100 languages, which is to be achieved with the

help of a Wikipedia-based corpus.

The meeting at Bled featured guests

and representatives of partners, including the IJS, the Karlsruhe Institute

of Technology, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, University of Zagreb,

the Chinese Tsinghua University, and iSOCO from Spain.

The next

meeting is expected in April in Barcelona, where the goal is a detailed

plan for the execution of the project.