Language Resource Citation: the ISLRN Dissemination and Further Developments

Language Resource Citation: the ISLRN Dissemination and Further Developments Valérie Mapelli, Vladimir Popescu, Lin Liu, Khalid Choukri ELDA/ELRA 9 rue des Cordelières, 75013 Paris, France Email: {mapelli; popescu; lin; choukri}@elda.org Abstract This article presents the latest dissemination activities and technical developments that were carried out for the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) service. It also recalls the main principle and submission process for providers to obtain their 13- digit ISLRN identifier. Up to March 2016, 2100 Language Resources were allocated an ISLRN number, not only ELRA’s and LDC’s catalogued Language Resources, but also the ones from other important organisations like the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Resource Management Agency (RMA) who expressed their strong support to this initiative. In the research field, not only assigning a unique identification number is important, but also referring to a Language Resource as an object per se (like publications) has now become an obvious requirement. The ISLRN could also become an important parameter to be considered to compute a Language Resource Impact Factor (LRIF) in order to recognize the merits of the producers of Language Resources. Integrating the ISLRN number into a LR-oriented bibliographical reference is thus part of the objective. The idea is to make use of a BibTeX entry that would take into account Language Resources items, including ISLRN. The ISLRN being a requested field within the LREC 2016 submission, we expect that several other LRs will be allocated an ISLRN number by the conference date. With this expansion, this number aims to be a spreadly- used LR citation instrument within works referring to LRs. Keywords: ISLRN, unique identifier, Language Resource citation 1. Principle and setting up The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) was set up with the aim of providing a universal and unique identification schema, dedicated specifically to Language Resources (LRs) within the Human Language Technology (HLT) field, and under a free service for the HLT Community. This to ensure that LRs are correctly identified, and consequently, recognized with proper references for their usage in applications within R&D projects, product evaluation and benchmarking, as well as in documents and scientific papers. After having reviewed a number of existing schemas (Choukri et al., 2011), the ISLRN identifier was implemented as a 12-digit random number as the new LR identifier, followed by 1 digit for a checksum number (see figure below). In association to this identification number, a metadata schema was built in order to delegate semantics of the LR content to metadata which can easily and richly describe it, instead of integrating it within the number itself. Inspired by the broadly known OLAC schema, this metadata targeted on simple, easy and quick to fill in, fields to avoid any misunderstanding, and thus offers a minimal set of information describing the related LR, such as the name of the resource, the resource type, the source/URL where more information on the resource can be found, the description, versioning information, languages, etc. ISLRN was endorsed by the NLP121 in 2013. In …

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