A not-for.profit organisation, the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) association is established under the law of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Its seat is in Luxembourg, headquarters in Paris (France).
Activities
Since its foundation in 1995, the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) has been a conduit for the distribution of speech, written and terminology Language Resources (LRs) for the Human Language Technology (HLT), a key compound of IST. In order to do so, a number of technical and logistic, commercial (prices, fees, royalties), legal (licensing, Intellectual Property Rights, Management), and information dissemination issues had to be addressed. Since its foundation, ELRA’s mission has enlarged slightly, broadening its objectives and responsibilities towards the HLT community. ELRA is now involved in the production, or commissioning of the production, of language resources through a number of initiatives, also actively committed to the evaluation of language engineering tools as well as to the identification of new resources. Finally, every other year, ELRA organizes a major conference LREC on language resources and evaluation; the latest edition has taken place in May 2006 in Genoa, Italy.
Mission
The mission of the Association is to promote language resources and evaluation for the Human Language Technology sector in all their forms and their uses, in a European context. Consequently, the goals are: to coordinate and carry out identification, production, validation, distribution, standardisation of languages resources, as well as support for evaluation of systems, products, tools, etc.
LANGUAGE RESOURCES (LRs)
DEFINITION
The term language resources refers to a set of speech or language data and descriptions in machine readable form, used e.g. for building, improving or evaluating natural language and speech algorithms or systems, or, as core resources for the software localisation and language services industries, for language studies, electronic publishing, international transactions, subject-area specialists and end users.
Examples of language resources are written and spoken corpora, computational lexicons, terminology databases, speech collection and processing, etc. Basic software tools are also important for the acquisition, preparation, collection, management, customisation and use of these language resources and other resources.
APPLICATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
ELRA
Catalogue of Language Resources
