Team

The project ELITR brought together a variety of people – from universities, commercial companies up to Supreme Audit Office.

Charles University, Czech Republic

The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (U´ FAL) is associated with the Computer Science School of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague. The main expertise of the Institute is in the theoretical description of language structure and preparation of linguistically annotated corpora for research as well as commercial usage, tools for natural language processing, machine learning applied to inflective and other languages (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Swedish, also English and Arabic), machine translation between Czech and other EU languages. The Institute participates in several ongoing research projects in the Czech Republic, the EU and the USA. The Institute coordinates its international Computational Linguistics, with more than 25 graduates in the past 10 years and over 20 currently enrolled PhD students. They actively participate in the research projects of the Institute. The Institute will contribute its data resources, especially in the area of parallel and semantically annotated texts as well as implemented tools, to the project.

University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The University of Edinburgh is one of the largest and most successful universities in the UK with an international reputation as a centre of academic excellence. The University is the leading research university in Scotland and is ranked fourth in the United Kingdom at the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014, and rated best in the UK in the research area Computer Science and Informatics, based on breadth and quality of research. The Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) group in Edinburgh is one of the leading research groups in this field, currently consisting of around 15 faculty, researchers, students and programmers. The group has experience in EU-wide collaborations, participating in the current EU-funded projects SUMMA and 14 recent ones (QT21, MMT, HimL, TraMOOC, Cracker, Accept, Casmacat, EU-Bridge, MateCat, MosesCore, EuroMatrixPlus, LetsMT!, EuroMatrix), coordinating 4 of them: Casmacat, MosesCore, HimL and SUMMA. The group is the home of the well-known machine translation toolkits Moses, Nematus and Marian, and is heavily involved in the organization of the yearly Conference on Machine Translation and the associated human evaluation campaigns. The group has a long track record of top-ranked submissions to shared evaluation tasks at the Conference on Machine Translation, and high quality research output. The SMT group is part of the Natural Language Processing Group at the University of Edinburgh (EdinburghNLP), which is one of the largest NLP groups in the world with 11 core faculty members.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

The Interactive Systems Laboratories (ISL) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology focus on developing user interfaces that improve human-machine and human-to-human communication. The ISL have been among the leading laboratories active in speech and language research and have pioneered many speech translation technologies. The laboratories are affiliated with the computer science department at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, and have sister laboratories at the School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley, USA. Both departments have ranked as best computer science departments for many years in Germany and the US, respectively. Through the efforts of ISL, KIT became a founding partner of InterACT, the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies, which includes 7 leading global research universities and research centers in 5 countries. The laboratory has been a part of many related German, European and international projects such as Verbmobil, PF-STAR, TC-STAR, Quaero, Babel, EU-BRIDGE, and QT21.

PerVoice, Italy

PerVoice S.p.A., founded in 2007 as a start-up of the ”Fondazione Bruno Kessler” Research Labs and other local enterprises, is the first Italian company specialised in processing, analysing and evaluating of spoken language in real time and supporting more than 20 languages. It became part of the Almawave group in 2013. PerVoice SpA develops and markets speech recognition “technologies” and “solutions” for use in industries such as broadcasting, media monitoring, call centers, health care, reporting, security. PerVoice provides to the market Software Solution as the following:

  • Broadcast Monitoring
  • Speech Analytics
  • Cybersecurity Audio Intelligence
  • Audio/video indexing
  • Law court/attorney reporting
  • Real time subtitling
  • Intelligent Voice responder (voice assistant)

In the Subtitling and Broadcasting market PerVoice provides solutions for both live and pre-recorded subtitling needs in, currently, 30 different languages. Real-time subtitling technology is adopted in main national television broadcasters to provide subtitles to hearing impaired and deaf persons. Moreover, the same technology has been adopted by major italian companies to provide subtitling during conferences and assemblies. PerVoice is also a global player in the Broadcast Monitoring market where it is a recognized partner of FIBEP, international association of media monitoring companies. Currently PerVoice technology has been adopted by major worldwide media monitoring companies and provides the transcription for more than 1000 television and radio channels.

In the Speech Analytics field PerVoice is a global player providing its speech recognition technology to enterprises needing to have more detailed insights on customer needs and satisfaction. In cooperation with its parent company, Almaviva, PerVoice has major installations in Italy and in Brazil and globally treats about 5 million phone calls per year.

PerVoice is also active in the Dictation and Reporting market, where it provides, through its partners, dictation solutions for various usage scenarios, varying from medical dictation to law firms to public sector.

alfatraining, Germany

alfatraining® is a German company offering professional training programs. The company was founded in 2005 and has offered since then publicly-funded trainings for professional development, further training for companies and extended vocational training for individuals. In 2010, the education center alfatraining® switched its teaching concept and started offering labor-market-relevant qualifications via the video conferencing system alfaview®. By using the high-tech video technology alfaview®, alfatraining® enables professional further education across borders, regardless of location, barrier-free and in real time. The video platform and technology behind alfaview® is a development and implementation of the education center alfatraining® itself. The data is stored in the EU. The video conferencing solution alfaview® can be used for professional online business meetings and online courses. With alfaview® all participants of a video conference call are virtually connected in real time, broadcasting lip-synced videos and sound of each attendee. In the online conference room the participants can see and hear each other and are able to learn and work together. As an audiovisual solution alfaview® can be utilized variably for different areas of application and offers each user the possibility to set up customized online conferencing rooms. With the video conferencing software developed by alfatraining, users are able to globally network with clients, cooperation partners and other companies on an audiovisual basis, live and in real-time.

In 2018 alfatraining® has grown to total 65 locations throughout Germany, 1 location in Greece and 40.000 course participants have already been qualified successfully in more than 200 different course modules. alfatraining® has 600 employees including teachers. The education center alfatraining® is eager to provide access to education to as many people as possible, enhance communication and to support other education institutes and companies in their use of virtual learning and communications solutions.

Supreme Audit Office, Czech Republic

The Supreme Audit Office is an independent audit institution with the mission to review the state’s management of public revenue and expenditure. The SAO’s task is to provide feedback to makers and implementers of national policies, so they know how successfully their policies have been implemented and at what price, how effective they have been, and what economic and other impacts they have made. SAO submits to the Government, to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, to the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, to experts, and to the general public the independent and the impartial information about whether national resources have been used effectively, economically, and efficiently and whether all binding legal regulations have been observed in their use. The SAO’s purpose is to answer whether and to what degree public resources have contributed to the desired improvements and to call attention to weaknesses in their spending.