Project objective:Europe and South East Asia are two areas where multiple cultures meet and many languages arespoken, often in the same city. All partners in this project are experts on multilingualism andmulticulturalism by academic training as well as by the nature of their local society, with differentAsian and European perspectives. We aim to bring these different academic and cultural perspectivestogether by the common thread of language: languages as media of knowledge and identity, as wellas linguistics and natural language processing as tools to analyze that medium.Brief description:The rapid accumulation of data in various languages in the EU and SEA, together with the fact thatour societies are becoming more and more multilingual, requires better tools, both at methodologicaland practical levels. Corpus and computational linguistics together with multilingual and multiculturalstudies are key domains in which various tools related to multilingual information management arecreated. These tools in turn benefit linguistic and cultural studies by providing readily available andsizeable corpora. Applications in the social sciences and in other information related domains, such asjournalism or politics, are numerous but remained largely unexplored (e.g. real time mutilingualprocessing of news in the areas being studied). It is the aim of this project to address the linguistic,cultural and technological aspects of these challenges, as well as to train the next generation ofspecialists in these domains and their interfaces. The joint effort of our institutions constitutes acrucial step to understand and to thrive within our multilingual and multicultural societies.