The annual meeting of Language Big Data Alliance (hereinafter referred to as "LBDA") is to be held in Guangzhou on April 7 and 8, 2017. Themed as "Inspire the Future," the meeting will be hosted by LBDA and co-organized by Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (hereinafter referred to as "GDUFS") and Global Tone Communication Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "GTCOM"). This year's meeting will feature a review of LBDA's achievements in global strategy since its foundation along with a summary of relevant experience to forge ahead towards a new stage of globalization. 

As a research and application alliance based on an open platform for big data resources sharing, LBDA has carried out extensive cooperation with its members in the fields of teaching, research and project practice facilitated by a wealth of technical resources including billions of corpora, speech recognition, machine translation and other technical resources. Notably, the "Chinese-Portuguese-English Machine Translation Laboratory," co-founded by GTCOM, Macao Polytechnic Institute and GDUFS, has made outstanding achievements in the technology R&D and application of Chinese-Portuguese machine translation, cross-language big data and other dimensions. Moreover, the laboratory has played a role in standardizing the quality of Chinese-Portuguese machine translation and improving translation speed, which provides the most powerful technology and platform support to the all-around exchanges in such fields as government affairs, economy, trade and culture between China, Portugal and the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China as well as promotes the implementation of the "Going Global" strategy for Chinese culture. 

The application of innovative language processing technologies has contributed to the global layout of LBDA as well as its partner enterprises, higher education institutions, government agencies and research institutes. Currently, LBDA boasts of more than130 members at home and abroad covering various sectors, including computer, language, legislation, journalism, economics and management. Meanwhile, the increasing global influence of LBDA has attracted numerous overseas universities to join the alliance, including the University of Vienna, the University of Geneva, Gazi University in Turkey and York University in Canada, which will further strengthen its global profile. The proportion of overseas colleges and universities members is expected for a continuous rise, with the estimated number reaching 30 in 2017. In addition, LBDA is rolling out more plans on the global stage. For example, it will organize a sub-forum at the International Federation of Translators Congress in Brisbane, Australia in August, where industry experts from around the world will jointly probe into the future of the language industry. Also, LBDA is seeking for in-depth cooperation with American Translators Association at the association’s annual conference at the end of this year.

LBDA will channel its future efforts into advancing resources exchanges and information sharing in cross-language sectors by consistently innovating language processing technologies, thus leading the integrated development of related policies, industry, teaching, research and application all over the world, as well as inspiring the connectivity of global resources and information globalization.