EASTIN-CL:
Crosslingual and multimodal Search in a Portal for Support of Assisted Living

Relevance

Participation and full citizenship, also called e-Inclusion, is one of the prominent goals of the European community. This includes the full participation of people with disabilities to social life.
In a 2003 study, the European Commission states that „assistive technologies play an increasingly central role in equalising opportunities for people with disabilities in all aspects of life“. This statement must be seen in the context that the number of people with disabilities, in an ageing society, will increase from now 11% to 17% in 2020, so the problem will aggravate in the future.
However, access to information about assistive products and technology is still restricted, with language being a significant barrier in the information flow.
Being able to understand foreign language documents, and being able to freely select the communication channel to access such information, as offered by EASTIN-CL, will foster the principles of e-Inclusion.

Objective

The project will support the social participation of disabled and elderly people, by providing crosslingual and multimodal support for accessing information bases on assistive tools and technology.
Recent efforts have linked national assistive technology information bases into a European portal called EASTIN (www.eastin.info). This portal will be enhanced and made more accessible using language technology:

• Multilingual technology will allow users to search the data in their native language;
• Multimodal technology will allow them to access the portal not just in written but also in spoken communication.

Target users currently are mainly professionals, like doctors, physiotherapists, insurances, or manufacturers. EASTIN-CL will help to open the information bases on assistive technologies also for end users (e.g. ageing people).

Main tasks

EASTIN-CL will support access to information bases on assistive domain along three action lines:

• providing easy and intuitive access also for end users, by supporting query formulation;
• making access language-transparent, by allowing users to access foreign-language documents in their native language, and have the search results retranslated into their native language;
• adding a speech communication channel, by accepting spoken queries, and by converting search results into spoken language.

The supported languages in EASTIN-CL are: Danish, English, Estonian, German, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian. Other languages can be added as well.

Expected Results

The result of the project will be a dedicated language server inside the EASTIN portal. Its task is to act as an interpreter, transforming voice into text and text into voice, and translating queries and documents form and into the users‘ native language.

A by-product will be a multilingual terminological glossary of the assistive domain, covering all relevant search terms and their translations. This glossary will be made available for online access.