„The calls have already resulted in 10 Lithuanian language digitisation projects worth almost EUR 20 million to date. By accelerating technological progress related to the Lithuanian language, we will encourage the faster deployment of advanced artificial intelligence solutions for use in areas of particular relevance, such as defence and security, healthcare and the public sector as a whole,“ said Aušrinė Armonaitė, Minister of the Economy and Innovation.
Currently, Lithuanian language resources projects are underway to develop a series of dictionaries and word lists. Bringing them closer to the needs of business, science and society would make it easier and simpler to communicate, access information and use services such as personal assistants and language translation tools.
The Lithuanian language resources being developed have a wide range of uses, from identifying misinformation and facilitating the use of Ukrainian to accelerating the development of medicine, biotechnology and genetics. They can also facilitate surveillance, intelligence analysis and improve cyber security.
A total of EUR 5 million will be spent on six new calls for the Lithuanian Language Institute and the State Agency for Digital Solutions to develop new Lithuanian language resources for artificial intelligence solutions and products.
„The Lithuanian digital language resources will enable the development of artificial intelligence solutions that will facilitate the delivery of everyday services. For example, in the medical field, automated text-writing solutions will free up doctors’ time to spend with patients, as routine tasks will be handled by artificial intelligence. Lithuania’s language resource projects will therefore stimulate innovation that will improve the quality of our lives,“ says Erika Kuročkina, Deputy Minister of the Economy and Innovation.
The European Union investment will be used to develop resources on the heritage of the Lithuanian language and spatial data on the Lithuanian language. The Lithuanian Language Institute, which is responsible for this area, will receive an investment of EUR 2.7 million.
The Lithuanian Language Heritage Database will ensure the preservation of the unique heritage of the Lithuanian language and provide open access to the Lithuanian and international public, researchers, educational institutions and business organisations. In addition, the digitised Lithuanian language files can be used to train artificial intelligence to recognise handwritten text.
The State Agency for Digital Solutions will implement the remaining projects through public procurement and business participation.
The funds will be used to develop a Lithuanian medical dictionary with an investment of EUR 520,000, as well as monolingual and parallel medical textbooks with an investment of EUR 240,000.
Lithuanian phonetics for the generation of neural voices for speech synthesis will receive EUR 680,000. The successful implementation of this project would allow people without in-depth knowledge of the language to design and develop artificial intelligence-based speech synthesis solutions, resulting in a neural voice that corresponds to the naturalness of the human voice, the ministry says.
Monolingual and parallel text libraries for defence and security are also set to be developed, with funding of EUR 240,000, and a text library for question-answer pairs, with funding of EUR 770,000.
The full terms and conditions of the calls are available on the European Union Investment website. Project implementation plans will be adopted by the Central Project Management Agency (CPMA).
The measure is being implemented as part of the Economic Recovery and Resilience Plan Next Generation Lithuania, funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU programme.