The Donostia Campus of the Basque Country Technology Park hosts the presentation of Euskorpus, the digital corpus of the Basque language

The Donostia Campus of the Basque Country Technology Park was the venue for the presentation of Euskorpus, a strategic project led by the Basque Government and chaired by Lehendakari Imanol Pradales. The event was also attended by Vice-Lehendakari Ibone Bengoetxea, as well as councillors Mikel Jauregi and Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias.

The Lehendakari announced this new project, which aims to become the key tool for the creation of a digital corpus in Basque. Euskorpus is already underway, promoted by the Department of Industry, Energy Transition and Sustainability, with the collaboration of the Departments of Culture and Language Policy, and Science, Universities and Innovation.

The joint involvement of these three areas reflects the Basque Government’s view that the development of a digital corpus in Basque is a strategic objective. This resource will enable language technologies to also respond in Basque with the level of quality required by the services of a highly digitalised society. Euskorpus aims to guarantee the presence of Basque in the digital ecosystem on an equal footing with other languages. As this is a project to ‘industrialise’ linguistic resources, public support is essential.

The development of the digital corpus will be carried out in three phases:

• Planning and definition phase, in which a technical office will be created to determine the type of corpus, the models to be developed and the sectors, services and strategic applications that will be able to benefit from this resource.
• Development phase, focused on the compilation of linguistic corpora in Basque, the promotion of open source base models and the implementation of infrastructures for their secure storage, testing and validation.
• Transfer and exploitation phase, which will seek to transfer the corpora and models developed to the business sector, society and European data platforms, promoting their use and exploitation.

During his speech, the Lehendakari stressed that ‘in this legislative term, we must make a qualitative leap in the presence and use of Basque: in leisure, sport, the workplace and, of course, in the digital environment. With Euskorpus, we are putting the full potential of Artificial Intelligence and language technologies at the service of the Basque language, our companies and research. We are doing this by combining capabilities and promoting public-private collaboration, with the aim of consolidating a robust, high-quality digital corpus’.

To close the event, a call was made to companies to join the Euskorpora association, thus contributing to strengthening the project and expanding its scope. Going forward, the Basque Government will continue to work through public-private collaboration to coordinate efforts and resources, both financial and operational, in favour of the development of Euskorpus.