The Government authorizes up to 5 million euros to promote the Basque language in artificial intelligence language models

● This initiative has, among its objectives, to enrich the family of ALIA language models with a corpus that strengthens the presence of the Basque language.

● It will also provide digital language resources in Basque to make it available to companies and society in general, thus generating an impact on the business fabric

● In addition, it will connect the Basque language to the European framework of linguistic resources, for its conservation, maintenance, evolution and exploitation in the service of the digital transformation of minority languages

The Council of Ministers has authorized the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service to allocate up to 5 million euros to promote the Basque language in artificial intelligence models, in collaboration with the Autonomous Community of Euskadi.

Specifically, the Ministry is authorized to seal a three-year agreement with the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country to promote the digital presence of the Basque language as an intangible heritage; enrich the family of ALIA language models with a corpus in which co-official languages, particularly Basque, have a greater presence; have digital linguistic resources in Basque to make it available to companies and society in general, thus generating an impact on the business fabric; and connect the Basque language to the European framework of linguistic resources, for its conservation, maintenance, evolution and exploitation at the service of the digital transformation of minority languages.

With this decision of the Council of Ministers, the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence will be able to contribute annually to the agreement 1.5 million euros per year in the next three years, taking into account that 500,000 euros would be transferred once the agreement was signed. Thus, the contribution of the Government of Spain would amount to a total of 5 million euros, which would be added to the 5.5 million euros that the Autonomous Community of Euskadi would allocate.

National Artificial Intelligence Strategy

The action is part of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, in which one of its main levers is the development of the ALIA initiative, to generate models of language in Spanish and co-official languages, in a public, open, transparent, open source and multilingual way. In this context, actions such as ILENIA, a collaborative project to promote co-official languages (Catalan, Galician, Basque and Valencian) in the field of artificial intelligence, have already been carried out.

It is also linked to the launch in 2022 of the PERTE New Language Economy, included in the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, in order to take advantage of the economic and competitive potential of Spanish and co-official languages in areas such as artificial intelligence, cultural dissemination and science, and develop tools and technological products that could be used by industry and society in general.