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The Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) was founded in Athens (Greece) in 1991 under the auspices of the General Secretariat of Research and Technology of the Ministry of Development. It now belongs to the Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies (“Athena”). The running aim of ATHENA RC is to be a centre of excellence in basic and applied R&D in the areas of:
• Natural Language Processing
• Speech processing, recognition and synthesis, music and sound processing
• e-learning, distance learning for language, culture and music
 
ATHENA RC is becoming a pole of attraction for the lively Greek and European industry of language and information technologies. The experience of its researchers, the close relations it holds with key research centres in other European countries and its industrial orientation are basic elements in the profile of ATHENA RC. ATHENA RC develops technologies on the following axes:
• digital monolingual, multilingual and multimedia corpora and dictionaries, computational lexical databases
• text processing and analysis for information retrieval and knowledge extraction
• multimodal and multilingual information processing and retrieval
• machine translation and translation aid tools
• stand-alone and integrated voice recognition and text-to-speech systems
• assistive technologies for disabled persons
• digital curation and presentation of cultural content
• multimedia e-learning platforms for language and music
 
ATHENA RC has successfully participated in more than 150 R&D projects. It is currently involved in around 30 national and European projects.

ATHENA RC has demonstrated significant development performance as evidenced by the following:
• a number of patented innovations
• over 35 end-user globally marketed products
• a rich palette of Greek language resources and tools
• quality service and support provision (design, technology integration, consulting)
• the foundation of spin outs exploiting technological outcomes with a strong potential in
dynamic market areas (voice enhanced services and appliances, e-learning, e-publishing, media monitoring, etc).
 
ATHENA RC is one of the Institutes of the newly established Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies “Athena”. Its activities are organised in six scientific departments:
Electronic Lexicography Department
Department of Language Technology Applications in Office Systems
Department of Educational Technology
Department of Speech Technology
Department of Machine Translation
Liaison and Technology Transfer Department

ATHENA RC operates a branch office in the Thrace area (northern Greece region)