By Amber Hickman |
Microsoft has launched two new initiatives to promote European culture and linguistic diversity in Europe as part of its European digital commitments.
The first initiative is targeted towards improving representation of languages within Europe, including the European Union’s 24 official languages and a variety of additional languages recognised on a national level, as many of these languages represent less than 0.6 per cent of web content currently.
“As the world digitises, much of Europe’s linguistic and cultural diversity risks being left behind,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft in an online blog post. “The majority of online web content, the primary source of training data for today’s large language models, is in English. Much of it reflects an American perspective. The European Commission has warned that the continent’s ambition to digitise its vast cultural corpus remains ‘significantly out of reach’. As Europe’s leaders have recognised, without urgent action, this imbalance is not just a cultural concern, it’s a commercial one. AI that doesn’t understand Europe’s languages, histories and values can’t fully serve its people, its businesses, or its future.”
To help bridge the language gap, Microsoft will collaborate with European partners to increase the availability of multilingual data. With the ICube Laboratory at the University of Strasbourg in France, Microsoft will support AI training efforts by creating and deploying a team of employees from the Microsoft Open Innovation Center (MOIC) and its AI for Good lab. This team will be supported by global internal network of more than 70 Microsoft engineers, data scientists and policy professionals.
The team will start by accessing Microsoft’s own store of multilingual data and making it accessible and transparent to the European public including open-source developers.
MOIC will also partner with Common Crawl, one of the largest free and open repositories of web-crawled data. MOIC will fund work at Common Crawl and leverage native speakers to annotate European language data.
Meanwhile, the second initiative is focused on digitally safeguarding Europe’s cultural heritage. For this Microsoft has partnered with the French Ministry of Culture and French firm Iconem to create a digital twin of the Notre Dame in Paris, France.
Microsoft is also working with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France to digitise nearly 1,500 cinematic model sets from shows at the Opera National de Paris between 1800 and 1914.