LINGUARISE-DC joins first DIGIT-HLTP evaluation workshop in Brno

On 19–20 November 2025, partners from the LINGUARISE-DC consortium took part in the first annual evaluation workshop held in Brno, Czech Republic. The event was hosted by Brno University of Technology and organised together with the ARCHER project, which is responsible for running the technological challenge on human language technologies (HLT) for defence.

The Brno workshop took place in the context of the European Defence Fund technological challenge “Agile and robust human language technologies for defence” (DIGIT-HLTP). Under this scheme, three projects – AtLaS, LINGUARISE-DC and NEMO – are developing and testing advanced human language technology demonstrators within a common evaluation framework designed and run by the ARCHER project.

Although each consortium has its own partnership structure and technical approach, all three are working towards the same objective: delivering robust, multilingual language capabilities that can operate reliably in realistic defence conditions. ARCHER defines the shared tasks, prepares datasets and runs the evaluation campaigns, while AtLaS, LINGUARISE-DC and NEMO focus on building and iteratively improving their systems based on the results.

This joint set-up encourages both healthy competition and structured knowledge exchange, helping to accelerate progress and to ensure that future defence-oriented language technologies are benchmarked in a transparent, comparable way.

Purpose of the Brno workshop

The Brno workshop was designed as a joint check-point for all actors engaged in the challenge:

• to review the first evaluation campaign, which covers four HLT tasks (ASR, MT, NER and OCR) on English and French;
• to share feedback and lessons learned on data, metrics, task design and submission procedures;
• to align plans for the upcoming campaigns, including priorities for future languages, domains and operational scenarios; and
• to strengthen collaboration among the three EDF consortia and the ARCHER team.

Sessions were devoted to reflecting on task achievements so far, discussing where systems struggled, and identifying improvements that will make future evaluations more realistic and more useful for defence end-users.

What this means for LINGUARISE-DC

For LINGUARISE-DC, the workshop was an important milestone in the first year of the project’s participation in the DIGIT-HLTP challenge:

• It provided direct feedback from ARCHER evaluators and peers on how LINGUARISE-DC systems perform on the shared tasks and where further robustness is needed for real defence scenarios.
• It helped the consortium better align its roadmap with the design of upcoming evaluation campaigns, ensuring that planned modules and use cases map cleanly onto the challenge tasks.
• It created space to exchange good practices with AtLaS and NEMO on topics such as domain adaptation, explainability, multilingual coverage and interaction with military stakeholders.
• It reinforced the community-building and dissemination dimension of LINGUARISE-DC by strengthening links with the wider ecosystem of HLT projects supported through the EU Defence Innovation Scheme.

Looking ahead

Over the coming years, ARCHER will continue to organise a series of evaluation campaigns within the technological challenge framework, with all three EDF consortia expected to submit improved systems and to test new capabilities as their platforms evolve.

The Brno workshop has helped ensure that LINGUARISE-DC enters this next phase with a clear understanding of the evaluation environment, a stronger connection to fellow DIGIT-HLTP projects, and concrete insights that will feed into the design of its defence-oriented language platform.