PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Development of Slovene in a Digital Environment – Language Resources and Technologies

With the project titled Development of Slovene in a Digital Environment (DSDE), which is financed by the Slovenian Ministry of Culture, Slovenia has recognized the importance of developing modern language technologies for Slovene. The project aim is to meet the needs for computational tools and services in the field of language technologies for Slovene – for research institutions, companies, and a wider public.

The outcomes of the project will be tools that help language user communicate, collaborate, conduct business, share knowledge, and take part in social and political debates in a user-friendly way. Additionally, these tools will help overcome language barriers.

The development of language technologies is crucial for language survival in the digital age; these tools are the only way to keep participating in the new ways of communication, work and leisure that will be available in the future.

This trend can already be seen in the segment of smart assistants, which we can already talk to today. But this holds true only for a handful of languages (Amazon Alexa – 8 languages, Google Assistant – 13 languages, Apple Siri – 21 languages). With the Development of Slovene in a Digital Environment project, we want to bring Slovene among these selected few.

All programming code and databases produced for this project will be publicly available under an open license. All applications (speech recognition, transcription, machine translation, terminology extraction, and a terminology portal) will be made available on the public DSDE portal (inspired by the Latvian hugo.lv), where anyone can try and use them.