This Thursday morning, the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) presented the tools developed for the LEIA Project –Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence–, which aims to ensure the correct use of Spanish in the digital universe. The innovations are an observatory of new words, a linguistic consultation system, a compiler of the different linguistic varieties of Spanish-speaking geographical areas, the digitization of files and a linguistic verification tool.
Asunción Gómez-Pérez, RAE academic and project director, has been in charge of presenting the platform and the different applications that will soon be available. The word observatory—which the Academy is already using—automatically detects words and expressions that are not included in the Dictionary of the Spanish Language. It does it every day, massively, drawing on the digital world and multiple sources such as social networks and the press.
The linguistic query system will expand the question mechanism that already exists in the RAE thanks to AI, which will classify queries through different variables and recover similar cases. Gómez-Pérez has clarified that “it will always be a linguist who will give the answer” and that this tool is not a “chatbot”.
To address the diversity of the language in different geographical areas, a compiler has been created that aims to massively group the linguistic information of Spanish speakers. This will be done through games or challenges, available to users, where the system will ask them a series of questions to gain information about a word.
The digitization of the red dot tokens—“high-value lexicographic slips that designate the first documentation of a word,” according to Rae—consists of scanning the tokens to transform them into images and transcribe their content.
The linguistic verification tool analyzes texts using artificial intelligence techniques, including the detection and classification of spelling, lexical, syntactic and morphological errors, as well as correction suggestions and explanations with links to doctrine.
The director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado, has made the objective of the project clear: to strengthen the presence of Spanish in the digital environment given the predominance of English. Muñoz recalled in his speech that the LEIA Project dates back to 2019, with its official presentation at the XVI Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies, so they are “pioneers” in the integration of this new technological integration in the Spanish-speaking cultural sphere. With these new advances, the manager assured, “the RAE decisively enters the territory of AI because it is not an option, but a necessity,” and with this the Academy “reaffirms its public commitment.”
From the Government, one of the organizations that finance the project, Aleida Alcaide, the general director of Artificial Intelligence of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, has also pointed out the threat to the Spanish language when interacting in English with the applications. The directive has made the objective clear: “Avoid linguistic monopoly in certain economic sectors in the future.”