Supporting language technologies and standardization
Artificial intelligence is now at the heart of technological challenges, and is the subject of massive support from our public authorities, initiated in 2018 with the presidential announcement of a national plan on artificial intelligence.
Language occupies a central place in artificial intelligence. On the one hand, the machine feeds on natural language data, and must therefore be able to analyse and absorb large amounts of written or oral information, for example through voice recognition; on the other hand, what the machine calculates and produces, it must be able to restore it to the human, in an understandable form, whether in written form, such as announcements of automatically written cultural events (robot-writing) or in oral form by means of voice synthesis, in as many languages as possible, involving the use of advanced language models for each language.
The development and continuous improvement of these technologies makes it possible to multiply the possible interactions with systems based on artificial intelligence, to the point that they are today omnipresent in our daily lives.
We must ensure that French is in a good position in terms of tools but also of available linguistic resources, to allow the development of these innovative tools, otherwise French would no longer be able to ensure these essential interactions in our daily lives, nor to access information, whether cultural or more generalist.
It’s also an issue of sovereignty for France and Europe, since the ability to develop these tools without resorting to foreign actors (today mostly North American or Asian) depends on the availability of language resources and quality models in our language.
Finally, we must ensure that the standards we use (such as international ISO standards) allow for the use of these languages and the easy transition from one language to another.
