Euskorpus, a project promoted by the Basque Government, will bring Basque to the AI revolution

The Donostia Campus of the Euskadi Technology Park hosted the presentation of the Euskorpus project, presided over by the Lehendakari Imanol Pradales, with the participation of the vice-president of the Basque Government, Ibone Bengoetxea, and the councillors Mikel Jauregi and Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias.

The Euskorpus project, which the Lehendakari has unveiled, is the fundamental tool for the generation of this digital corpus in Basque. Euskorpus is already underway and is run by the Department of Industry, Energy Transition and Sustainability. In addition, the Departments of Culture and Language Policy and Science, Universities and Innovation are also participating in the project.

This triple involvement stems from the Basque Government’s consideration that the creation of this corpus is strategic in order to ensure that language technologies also respond in Basque with the necessary quality for the services that exist and will exist in a highly digitalised society. In this context, the aim of the Euskorpus initiative is to ensure that Basque is present in the digital market under similar conditions to other languages and, as it is a project for the ‘industrialisation’ of language resources, public support is essential.

The creation of the digital corpus of Basque will be carried out in three main phases: the first phase will be the planning and definition phase, during which the technical office will be set up to determine the typology of the corpus and the models to be developed, and the sectors, applications and strategic services that may benefit from it will be defined.

In the second phase, the aim is to promote the compilation of linguistic corpora in Basque, to promote the development of open code base models, and to promote infrastructures for secure storage, testing and validation.

Finally, in the third phase, the transfer and exploitation of the linguistic corpora that are compiled and the open source base models that are developed to companies, society and other European data platforms will be promoted.

The Lehendakari, Imanol Pradales, recalled that, in this legislature, we have to make a leap in quality in the presence and use of Basque: in leisure, in sport, in the world of work, and of course, in the digital sphere… ‘With the EUSKORPUS project that we are presenting, we are putting all the potential of Artificial Intelligence and language technologies at the service of Basque, our companies and research. We are doing so by aligning all our capacities and through public-private collaboration, with the aim of perfecting the digital corpus of texts in Basque’.

To conclude the Euskorpus presentation ceremony, an appeal was made to companies to get involved in the Euskorpora association, helping to promote and give greater scope to the project. From now on, through public-private collaboration, the Basque Government will focus on working and coordinating efforts to enrich the Euskorpus project, aligning both economic and other operational resources to this end.