The CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3312–3316 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3312 The CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise Henk van den Heuvel1, Nelleke Oostdijk1, Caroline Rowland2,3, Paul Trilsbeek2 1CLS/CLST, Radboud University, Nijmegen 2The Language Archive, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 3Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour, Nijmegen {h.vandenheuvel, n.oostdijk}@let.ru.nl, {caroline.rowland, paul.trilsbeek}@mpi.nl Abstract This paper introduces a new CLARIN Knowledge Center which is the K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (ACE for short) which has been established at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) at Radboud University. Atypical communication is an umbrella term used here to denote language use by second language learners, people with language disorders or those suffering from language disabilities, but also more broadly by bilinguals and users of sign languages. It involves multiple modalities (text, speech, sign, gesture) and encompasses different developmental stages. ACE closely collaborates with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in order to safeguard GDPR-compliant data storage and access. We explain the mission of ACE and show its potential on a number of showcases and a use case. Keywords: infrastructure, atypical communication, language resources. 1. Background and Aims Over the past years the European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology (CLARIN; clarin.eu) has taken shape (Hinrichs et al., 2014; De Jong et al., 2018). The infrastructure is directed towards researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It provides users access to distributed data and tools through a single sign-on online environment (De Jong, 2019). Apart from the technical infrastructure and accompanying protocols, CLARIN has been investing in what is referred to as the Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure (KSI)1. The KSI should ensure that knowledge and expertise as regards the technical infrastructure, the way it operates and how it can be used, is shared between all stakeholders, from resource and technology providers to end users. In the CLARIN networked organizational structure, the knowledge (K-)centres play a central role in the dissemination of (specialized) knowledge and expertise. K-centres can advise on issues pertaining to data collection and data management, can provide information as regards available resources and services, where to find and how to access them, and provide support for various methodologies and applications. K- centres can also offer training courses in their respective fields of expertise. At present there are 20 certified K-centres2. One of the latest additions is the K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (ACE for short) which has been established at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) at Radboud University. The mission of ACE is to support researchers engaged in investigating what can be characterised as atypical communication. Atypical communication is an umbrella term used here to denote language use by second language learners, people with language disorders or those suffering from language disabilities, but also to languages that pose particularly difficult issues for analysis, such as sign languages and languages spoken in a multilingual context. It …

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