The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the Generalitat de Catalunya present the Aina Challenge: the program to accelerate the use and development of AI tools in Catalan. One more step, to achieve the technological transfer of the technologies developed by Aina. A fact that directly responds to the fundamental objective of the project: to facilitate the adoption of AI technologies in Catalan by companies. The call will begin this March with a 30-day submission period. Once all the applications received have been analyzed, a selection committee will choose the 22 winning companies. Each of the 22 selected proposals will receive a cash grant of €50,000 or €33,000 (depending on the challenge they respond to) plus €15,000 in services and other benefits, subject to the roadmap of a 6-month acceleration program during which they will have to develop and validate their solution with the BSC.
Boost to the language technology sector and its use in Catalan
The first edition of the Aina Challenge, endowed with a total of €1M, was born with a dual objective: to promote the development and improvement of AI applications for natural language processing in Catalan and to favor the development of a powerful sector of applications in artificial intelligence (AI) and language technologies (TL) with the country’s emerging companies and SMEs.
To achieve these goals, the Aina Challenge poses three challenges in this first edition for technology companies to propose the most innovative solutions with the aim of eventually entering the market. Participating companies must offer a total or partial solution to any of the three challenges:
- AI/TL services in Catalan. Develop new or existing AI/TL services or applications in Catalan.
- Control and monitoring of AI/TL. Optimize and govern AI in Catalan from values and cybersecurity.
- Development of open resources. Nurture, adapt and scale TL in Catalan.
According to Minister Roger Torrent, with the presentation of the competition: “the Aina project takes a very important step towards the use and normalization of Catalan in the digital sphere”. With the presentation of the call, Aina enters the phase of industrialization and promotion of the use of its technologies in the ecosystem of language technologies in Catalan.
Present and future of the Aina project
Promoted by the Government within the framework of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy of Catalonia Catalonia.AI and developed by the BSC, the Aina project aims to generate corpuses and computer models of the Catalan language so that companies that create AI-based applications, such as voice assistants, Internet search engines, automatic translators and correctors and conversational agents, can do so easily in Catalan. All with the ultimate goal of being able to relate and live fully in Catalan also in the digital sphere.
Started in 2020, the project now takes a step forward and focuses on those initiatives that may have a path and application in the field of AI for natural language processing in Catalan.
So far, Aina has already developed the first multilingual linguistic models, all of them open and available to everyone. More than 3,000 users have downloaded the latest model, Flor 6.3B, trained with a corpus of more than 140,000 million words in Catalan, Spanish and English. The solutions developed by Aina are either directly multilingual, or can serve as a model for developing AI-based solutions for other languages.
On the other hand, thanks to Aina’s boosting (and with the involvement of users), Catalan is now the first language, even ahead of English, in the number of hours available on Mozilla’s Common Voice platform for training speech models. These resources are essential for including Catalan in voice applications.
The language technology team at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is already working on a GPT3 model in Catalan. In addition, efforts are being intensified to promote specific use cases and applications in the field of voice recognition or machine translation, through initiatives such as the program to accelerate the use and development of AI tools in Catalan (Aina Challenge), in order to revitalize the language technology sector and promote the use of these tools in Catalan.
Alliance with the GSMA
The Generalitat de Catalunya and the GSMA, the organizing entity of the MWC, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in September 2023 by which both entities commit to collaborating to jointly promote the Catalan language in the technological and digital field on a global scale through the Aina project.
Within the framework of this initiative, the Government and GSMA collaborated to openly promote the activities and tools developed by the AINA project globally; raise awareness about the benefits generated by the use of these techniques for digital citizens; and share experiences and learnings on efforts for the digital preservation of language and culture.
Within the framework of this alliance, the presentation and launch of the first edition of the Aina Challenge during the MWC has the collaboration of the GSMA Foundry, which works to bring the initiative to interested actors and centers at the international level.
