Type of Project: Funded project Transnational project
EASTIN-CL - Crosslingual and multimodal Search in a Portal for Support of Assisted Living

The project will support the social participation of disabled and elderly people by providing a crosslingual and multimodal portal containing information on assistive tools and technology. There are large collections of assistive technology products and additional information, searched by both professionals (doctors, insurances, manufacturers) and end users. Recently the national databases were linked into a European portal (EASTIN). Search technology relies mainly on classification ISO 9999: “Technical aids for persons with disabilities”. Drawbacks of the current solution are: Users must know the structure of the classification system to search successfully; this prevents occasional users from success Users must know language and special terminology of the info base (national databases are language-specific); this means prohibitively high access costs Access requires skills in keyboard input and display output; no other interaction modes exist. This restricts the access for (sometimes disabled) end users, for whom the technology is intended. EASTIN-CL will improve access to assistive information by: providing cross-lingual retrieval, and machine translation for both queries and documents. The translation components will support Danish, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, hitherto not sufficiently supported in the EASTIN framework. Both query translation and result translation will be offered, tuned for the assistive domain improving the ease-of-use of the interface, to support non-expert users improving the accessibility to the information base offering audio input and output for some languages. The result will lead to an improved service with higher visibility in Europe for both professionals and end users.