Europe and South East Asia are two areas where multiple cultures meet and many languages are spoken, often in the same city. All partners in this project are experts on multilingualism and multiculturalism by academic training as well as by the nature of their local society, with different Asian and European perspectives. We aim to bring these different academic and cultural perspectives together by the common thread of language: languages as media of knowledge and identity, as well as 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 that our societies are becoming more and more multilingual, requires better tools, both at the methodological and practical levels. Corpus and computational linguistics together with multilingual and multicultural studies are key domains in which various tools related to multilingual information management are created. These tools in turn benefit linguistic and cultural studies by providing readily available and sizeable corpora. Applications in the social sciences and in other information related domains, such as journalism or politics, are numerous but remained largely unexplored (e.g. real time mutilingual processing 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 of specialists in these domains and their interfaces. The joint effort of our institutions constitutes a crucial step to understand and to thrive within our multilingual and multicultural societies.