The Government announced yesterday the investment of 90 million euros in the start-up of a Plan to Promote Language Technologies, which will be developed during the period 2016-2020, in the framework of the Digital Agenda for Spain.
 
This new strategy, whose objective is to invigorate the industry that investigates and develops applications and technological solutions linked to the Natural Language Processing (NLP), was made public by the vice-president of the Government Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría. A total of 14 million euros of the budget of the Plan will be used next year, and one of its main objective is education.
 
The Plan, as indicated in the official press note, aims to generate economic and employment opportunities, when detecting a great market niche in the sector of Language Technologies, especially in the markets where Spanish has more impact.
 
Moreover, Spanish experiences a “good governance. Spain also counts on a vast experience in managing an environment in which two co-official languages coexist, and there are a certain urgency in strengthening this industry if we want our country to be the leader of the places where Spanish is the priority language.”
 
The new strategy has been organised in four big points of action: support to the development of linguistic infrastructures, boost of the Language Industry, administration as promotor of the Language Industry, and Lighthouse Projects.
 
It is necessary to highlight the Lighthouse Projects of development of PLN applications that are promoted by the fourth point of the plan and that will intervene in three areas with a great social impact: health service, tourism, and education.
 
In this last area, it will be promoted the online teaching, with tools that simplify texts for special teaching, help teachers, and analyse opinions. Additionally, it will be generated assistance for the development of online courses, and for the automatic translation of co-official languages and the Ibero-American varieties of Spanish.