Over the past 18 months, Euromap has been collecting information on 'Who's Who' in Human Language Technology research and market opportunities in the New Accession countries of Eastern and Central Europe, ranging from Estonia in the farthest North to Malta in the deepest south.

There have been previous attempts to survey this geography from an HLT angle (e.g. ELSNET Goes East), and R&D centres in many of the countries in question have participated in various projects focused on language in such European Commission-funded programmes as INCO, FP4, HLT and eContent. This new EUROMAP Yellow Pages, however, can claim to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date directory to current language technology centres and people.

Following the EU Summit in Denmark in December 2002, where a common commitment was made to welcome new candidate countries with their national languages in 2005, this Euromap survey takes on renewed importance in the context of an enlarged eEurope bid to become the most advanced knowledge society by the year 2010. It is widely felt that human language technologies are one of the key tools for reaching such an objective.

To find out more about the HLT situation in the CEEC country of interest, simply click on the relevant country to access that country's fact file in a printable form.

The list of CEEC HLT R&D Organisations was updated to Q1 2003. Due to the dynamic nature of this emerging field, it may well be not up to date.

For direct HLT contacts in these countries, you can consult the Euromap Who's Who, the ELSNET Experts list or the LT World People list.

Euromap would like to thank everyone in all of the countries concerned by this survey for their help and encouragement. For fact files on the EU-15 countries click here.