The Government of Spain and the Royal Spanish Academy join forces to promote the LEIA project and boost the Spanish language in the development of artificial intelligence

The Ministry of Economy and Digital Transformation, through the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, and the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) have signed an agreement to promote the Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence (LEIA) project, which aims to improve the use of Spanish in areas where artificial intelligence is being developed.

With this agreement, the Government and the RAE join forces to develop technologies and tools that allow a greater and better use of Spanish in the digital sphere, using artificial intelligence.

The agreement signed is the first milestone of the recently approved Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE) New Language Economy, which is part of the Recovery Plan and the Digital Spain Arena.

This Strategic Project foresees an investment of 1.1 billion euros within the framework of the Recovery Plan and the Digital Spain Agenda launched by the Government, which proposes the need to develop data platforms and technological infrastructures to support AI.

Through this agreement, linguistic resources, tools and models will be generated and made available to research centres, companies and users in an open, accessible manner and in formats suitable for their use and reuse, generating an important transfer of knowledge to the economy.

Among the many activities planned, the creation of a digital seal of the RAE certifying that technological tools and AI use Spanish in an appropriate way stand out; technical and documentary resources will be provided to improve the use of Spanish in AI and in technology in general, while AI will be used to perfect the use of Spanish and its automatic processing.

To this effect, the creation of an observatory of neologisms and technical terms is envisaged, where AI will automatically compile this type of words in real time, and the development of tools for both linguistic verification and automatic response, to mention just a few examples. All of this will be accessible free of charge at www.rae.es.

Language is increasingly important in tools such as chatbots, virtual assistants, simultaneous translation and reading comprehension. The developments and results obtained through the implementation of this agreement will benefit the entire Spanish-speaking community of 591 million people, 7.5% of the world's population. Spanish is the third most used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese.

The agreement stresses that artificial intelligence is not just another technology, nor an activity that only affects the academic and scientific sphere, but a key discipline for transformation and the digital economy, which affects the well-being and prosperity of society. The main objective of the LEIA project, devised and led by the RAE, is to ensure that machines speak correct Spanish.

Non official translation