New directions in ELRA activities

New Directions in ELRA Activities Valérie Mapelli, Victoria Arranz, Pawel Kamocki, Hélène Mazo, Vladimir Popescu ELDA/ELRA 9 rue des Cordelières, 75013 Paris, France Email: {mapelli, arranz, kamocki, mazo, popescu}@elda.org Abstract Beyond the generic activities (cataloguing, producing, distribution of Language Resources, dissemination of information, etc.) that make the overall ELRA mission an indispensable middle-man in the field of Language Resources (LRs), new directions of work are now being undertaken so as to answer the needs of this ever-moving community. This impacts the structure and the operating model of the association per se with the creation of a new technical committee dealing with Less-Resourced Languages and the modification of the ELRA membership policy. It also intrinsically impacts the axes of work at all steps of activities: offering new tools for sharing LRs and related information, adapting to new legal requirements, producing and offering field-specific data. This paper addresses these new directions and describes ELRA (and its operational body ELDA) regular activities updates. Future activities are also reported in the last part of the article. They consist in ongoing projects like the ELRC initiative, the start of another CEF-funded project, the European Language Resource Infrastructure (ELRI), the updating of the Review of existing Language Resources for languages of France, and the continuation of the ELRA Catalogue development. Keywords: Less-Resourced languages, ELRA Membership, Cataloguing, Open Data, ISLRN, LR Production, Events 1. Introduction Beyond the generic activities (cataloguing, producing, dissemination of information, etc.) that make the overall ELRA1 mission an indispensable middle-man in the field of Language Resources (LRs), new directions of work are now being undertaken so as to answer the needs of this ever-moving community. This impacts the structure and the operating model of the association per se with the creation of a new technical committee dealing with Less-Resourced Languages and the modification of the ELRA membership policy. It also intrinsically affects the axes of work at all steps of activities: offering new tools for sharing LRs and related information, adapting to new legal requirements, producing and offering field-specific data. This paper addresses these new directions and describes ELRA (along with its operational body ELDA) regular activities updates. 2. New operating directions at ELRA 2.1. LRL Committee and SIGUL In October 2016, ELRA launched the ELRA-LRL TC (Less-Resourced Languages Technical Committee). It focuses on different actions to be undertaken to support the maintenance of linguistic diversity through technology and ICT for minority/less-resourced languages. Defining an agenda for LRTs development, allowing a better sharing of corresponding tools and LRs, sharing and spreading state- of-the art knowledge, exploring techniques for evaluation of LRTs, promoting related management plans, are part of the objectives. In April 2017, with the support of the LRL Committee, ELRA partnered with the ISCA to create a joint Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL)2 aiming to bring together a number of professionals involved in the development of Language Resources and technologies for under-resourced languages. 1 http://www.elra.info 2 http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/ Under the auspices of Interspeech 2017 in Stockholm, SIGUL organised its first event …

Content truncated to 500 words