The National Laboratory for Digital Heritage at the Science Expo

2025.10.31.

From October 28 to 30, the Millenáris D Building became the home of discovery and innovation as the Science Expo opened its doors. The National Laboratory for Digital Heritage (NLDH) and ELTE Digital Humanities Center (ELTE DH) showcased how cutting-edge technologies brought culture, language, and science closer to everyone through interactive demonstrations.

At the joint booth of NLDH, ELTE DH, and ELTE’s Department of Artificial Intelligence, visitors were able to explore how artificial intelligence supported the preservation, analysis, and dissemination of Hungarian language and cultural heritage. The long-standing scientific and educational collaboration between these institutions had already produced numerous innovative results, several of which were presented at the Expo.

Among the highlights was the largest Hungarian language training corpus, containing 65 million documents and 41.5 billion words. Visitors could also try the RAG-based chatbot developed for the MTA200 exhibition, which shared stories about the history of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the voice of actor Pál Oberfrank.

The event also featured HTR and OCR projects, including the award-winning handwriting recognition program capable of reading János Arany’s manuscripts, recipient of the Social Innovation Award in 2024.

Other interactive demos included text and document simplification tools, as well as Racka, a compact Hungarian-language model designed to run efficiently on everyday computers. A new research project demonstrated how students’ essays could be used to assess reflective thinking skills.