META-NET
META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to fostering the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. Language Technologies allow a number of major challenges to be overcome:
- enabling communication and cooperation across languages,
- securing users of any language equal access to information and knowledge,
- building upon and advancing functionalities of networked information technology.
A concerted, substantial, continent-wide effort in language technology research and engineering is needed for realising applications that enable automatic translation, multilingual information and knowledge management and content production across all European languages. This effort will also enhance the development of intuitive language-based interfaces to technology ranging from household electronics, machinery and vehicles to computers and robots.
To this end META-NET is building the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance (META). Bringing together researchers, commercial technology providers, private and corporate language technology users, language professionals and other information society stakeholders. META will prepare the necessary ambitious joint effort towards furthering language technologies as a means towards realising the vision of a Europe united as one single digital market and information space.
META-NET is supporting the above goals by pursuing three lines of action:
- Fostering a dynamic and influential community around a shared vision and strategic research agenda (META-VISION)
- creating an open distributed facility for the sharing and exchange of resources (META-SHARE)
- building bridges to relevant neighbouring technology fields (META-RESEARCH).
NaCTeM will assist in these lines of action in the following ways:
- Surveying and charting the field of language technologies in the English language
- Mobilizing researchers, decision makers, users and providers of LT and R&D programmes in the UK for cooperation and collaboration in META.
- Making tools at resources from NaCTeM available on the META-SHARE platform, and encourgaing others to do the same.
- Demonstrating pilot applications via the U-Compare platform. This will showcase the power of combining tools and resources from different providers into workflows to create various types of applications, both monolingual and cross-lingual
Project team
Prinicpal Investigator: Prof. Sophia AnaniadouCo-Investigator: Mr. John McNaught
Researcher: Mr. Paul Thompson
PhD student: Mr. Georgios Kontonatsios
Publications
Kontonatsios, G., Korkontzelos, I., Kolluru, B., Thompson, P. and Ananiadou, S. (In Press). Deploying and Sharing U-Compare Workflows as Web Services. Journal of Biomedical SemanticsKontonatsios, G., Korkontzelos, I. and Ananiadou, S. (2012). Developing Multilingual Text Mining Workflows in UIMA and U-Compare. In Proceedings of the 17th International conference on Applications of Natural Language Processing to Information Systems.
Miwa, M., Thompson, P., McNaught, J., Kell, D. B. and Ananiadou, S. (2012). Extracting semantically enriched events from biomedical literature. BMC Bioinformatics, 13:108
Kontonatsios, G., Korkontzelos, I., Kolluru, B. and Ananiadou, S. (2011). Adding Text Mining Workflows as Web Services to the BioCatalogue. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Aplications and Tools for the Life Sciences (SWAT4LS).
Thompson, P., Nawaz, R., McNaught, J. and Ananiadou, S. (2011) Enriching a biomedical event corpus with meta-knowledge annotation. BMC Bioinformatics 12:393.
Thompson, P., Kano, Y., McNaught, J., Pettifer, S., Attwood, T. K., Keane, J. and Ananiadou, S. (2011). Promoting Interoperability of Resources in META-SHARE. In Proceedings of the IJCNLP Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm (LRTS), pp. 50- 58.
Ananiadou, S., Thompson, P., Kano, Y., McNaught, J., Attwood, T. K., Day, P. J. R., Keane, J., Jackson, D. and Pettifer, S. (2011). Towards Interoperability of European Language Resources. Ariadne, 67.
Featured News
- Call for papers: CL4Health @ NAACL 2025
- Prof. Sophia Ananiadou accepted as an ELLIS fellow
- Invited talk at the 15th Marbach Castle Drug-Drug Interaction Workshop
- BioNLP 2025 and Shared Tasks accepted for co-location at ACL 2025
- Prof. Junichi Tsujii honoured as Person of Cultural Merit in Japan
- Participation in panel at Cyber Greece 2024 Conference, Athens
- Shared Task on Financial Misinformation Detection at FinNLP-FNP-LLMFinLegal
- New Named Entity Corpus for Occupational Substance Exposure Assessment
- FinNLP-FNP-LLMFinLegal @ COLING-2025 - Call for papers
Other News & Events
- Keynote talk at Manchester Law and Technology Conference
- Keynote talk at ACM Summer School on Data Science, Athens
- Invited talk at the 8th Annual Women in Data Science Event at the American University of Beirut
- Invited talk at the 2nd Symposium on NLP for Social Good (NSG), University of Liverpool
- Invited talk at Annual Meeting of the Danish Society of Occupational and Environmental Medicine