Our Foundation is a training and research institution promoting cultural diversity and sustainable development. Our mission is to highlight the languages of the world in order to enable all people to access the knowledge and information available on and through the Internet, in their native languages. For that matter we are developing a unique multilingual information processing system, the Univer
sal Networking Language (UNL), which aims at breaking the language barriers within the digital society. Eventually, all languages in the world shall be represented in the system. This initiative was originally supported by former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, and launched by Professor Tarcísio G. Della Senta, founder and first director of the Institute of Advanced Science of the United Nations University (UNU/IAS). More than 1500 linguistic developers and IT-specialists throughout the world work on the development of the system. The work is carried out independently or within internationally renowned universities and institutions such as: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Library of Alexandria, University of Geneva, University of Patras, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, National Science Academy of Armenia, etc. Our system holds infinite potential through a large array of functionalities such as automatic text summarization, high precision information retrieval and extraction, text simplification and machine translation. With this system many projects and services can be developed in various domains such humanitarian aid, culture, education or commerce. We are currently committed to:
- Developing applications devoted to humanitarian aid. For instance sending emergency notifications in local languages to the mobile devices of populations endangered by epidemics or natural disasters.
- The creation of a interconnected digital library for text preservation and processing. Users would for instance be able to access texts in their native language for which there does not exist any translations.
- The creation of electronic dictionaries for lifting minority languages out of their isolation.
