The Generalitat de Catalunya launches the Aina Challenge, an acceleration program for companies in artificial intelligence and language technologies
The Generalitat de Catalunya, through the Department of Business and Work and the Secretariat of Digital Policies, has presented today, within the framework of the MWC 2024, the Aina Challenge, a competition that will reward up to 22 million euros business projects that develop and improve natural language artificial intelligence (AI) services or applications in Catalan. This initiative is part of the Aina project, a platform promoted by the Catalan Government and developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to promote Catalan in the digital age.
The Minister of Business and Work, Roger Torrent, was in charge of announcing the launch of the Aina Challenge, accompanied by the Secretary of Digital Policies, Gina Tost. Torrent emphasized that “this competition is a very important step for the use and normalization of Catalan in the digital sphere”. “What we want with this challenge is to generate use cases with companies in the AI sector and language technologies that can take advantage of all the work that has been done in the Aina project and the resources offered by this platform to create solutions practical and tangible, natural language AI apps and services in Catalan, which reach the market, and therefore, the end user”, added the minister.
Three challenges for participating companies
In this first edition, the Aina Challenge presents three challenges that participating companies can opt for:
- Develop services or applications of artificial intelligence and language technologies, new or already existing, in Catalan.
- Optimize and govern AI in Catalan from values and cyber security.
- Development of open resources. Nurture, adapt and scale the technologies of the language in Catalan.
Once all the applications received have been analysed, a selection committee will choose the 22 winning companies. Each will receive a cash grant of €50,000 or €33,000 (depending on the challenge to which they respond) plus €15,000 in services and other benefits.
Present and future of the Aina project
Promoted by the Catalan Government as part of the Catalonia.AI Artificial Intelligence Strategy and developed by the BSC, the Aina project aims to generate corpora and computer models of the Catalan language so that companies that create applications based on AI, such as voice assistants, internet search engines, automatic translators and proofreaders and conversational agents, can easily do this in Catalan. All with the ultimate aim 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 can have a path and an application in the field of AI for the processing of natural language in Catalan.
So far, Aina has already developed the first multilingual language 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 drive (and with the involvement of users), Catalan is already the first language, even ahead of English, in terms of hours available on the Common platform Mozilla Voice for training speech models. These resources are essential to be able to include Catalan in voice applications.
The language technology team of the Aina project is already working on its own GPT3 model in Catalan. In addition, efforts are being stepped up to drive specific use cases and applications in the field of speech recognition or machine translation, through initiatives such as the Tool Development and Usage Acceleration Program of AI in Catalan (Aina Challenge), in order to energize the language technology sector and promote the use of these tools in Catalan.
