Alolita Sharma (Wikipedia) to deliver keynote at 7th Multilingual Web Workshop (May 7–8, 2014, Madrid)

We are please to announce that Alolita Sharma, Director of Engineering for Internationalization and Localization at Wikipedia, will deliver the keynote at the 7th Multilingual Web Workshop, “New Horizons for the Multilingual Web,” in Madrid, Spain (7–8 May 2014).

With over 30 million articles in 286 languages as of January 1, 2014, Wikipedia has now become one of the largest providers of multilingual content in the world. Because of its user-generated and constantly changing content, many traditional processes for managing multilingual content on the web either do not work or do not scale well for Wikipedia. Alolita Sharma’s keynote will highlight Wikipedia’s diversity in multilingual user-generated content and the language technologies that Wikipedia has had to develop to support its unprecedented growth of content. She will also discuss the many challenges Wikipedia faces in providing language support for the mobile web.

The Multilingual Web Workshop series brings together participants interested in the best practices, new technologies, and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others address the new opportunities and challenges of the multilingual Web. It will provide for networking across communities and building connections.

Registration for the Workshop is free, and early registration is recommended since space at the Workshop is limited.

There is still opportunity for individuals to submit proposals to speak at the workshop. Ideal proposals will highlight emerging challenges or novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience. The deadline for speaker proposals is March 14, but early submission is strongly encouraged. See the Call for Participation for more details.

This workshop is made possible by the generous support of the LIDER project, which will organize a roadmapping workshop on linked data and content analytics as one of the tracks at Multilingual Web Workshop.