Plain Concepts and LEIA, the RAEs project to promote the correct use of language in technology

The Spanish Royal Academy of Language (RAE) presented its project “Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence” (LEIA) during the XVI Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies last Friday in Seville.

This ambitious initiative aims at the defense, promotion and good use of the Spanish language in the digital universe and especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence and the latest technologies. The two main objectives that have been set are to ensure the proper use of the Spanish language in machines and to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence to create tools that promote the correct use of Spanish worldwide.

The LEIA project was initially promoted by Telefónica but is now supported by other companies such as Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. These companies have signed an official collaboration agreement with RAE committing themselves to use RAE’s materials such as dictionaries, grammar or spelling in the development of their voice assistants, word processors, search engines, chatbots, instant messaging systems, social networks, and any other resource, as well as to follow the criteria on the correct use of Spanish approved by this institution.

Plain Concepts has collaborated on this initiative with Microsoft by developing a plug-in for Microsoft Word. A chatbot that answers any questions about the correct use of Spanish. The machine is fed by different sources of knowledge, such as the official dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy of Language, but it also processes the stream from the RAE’s Twitter account to generate answers to questions that have been previously made on the social network.

Collaborating companies have been able to show some of these tools in this video. Some of them already exist or will exist very soon and are the result of the interaction between RAE’s language and resources and Artificial Intelligence.