Diapositive 1

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European Language Resources Association
ELRAs Services 15 Years on... Sharing
and Anticipating the Community
Victoria Arranz Khalid Choukri ELRA/ELDA 55
Rue Brillat-Savarin, F-75013 Paris, France Tel.
33 1 43 13 33 33 -- Fax. [phone]
30 Email arranz, choukri_at_elda.org http//www.el
ra.info/ or http//www.elda.org/
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Overview

• Before ELRA was established
• once upon a time
• rational behind its foundation and its Mission(s)
• ELRA Activities
• Identification and Distribution
• Production of LRs
• Evaluation of Human Language Technologies
• Dissemination
• New Visions
• Large International Cooperation
• Advocating for a Backbone of Language Resources
  and HLT evaluation, Open and Shared

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ELRAs Foundation Mission

• Created in February 1995
• Funding from the European Commission 3 years
• Main rationale bring into focus the need for a
  mutual exchange and use of LRs
• A Repository Center
• Technical Logistic issues
• Commercial issues (prices, fees, royalties)
• Legal issues (Licensing, IPR)
• Information Dissemination
• Infrastructure for the evaluation of Human
  Language Technologies providing resources, tools,
  methodologies, logistics, Exit strategies /
  Capitalization on evaluation packages
• Operational body ELDA

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Activities
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Identification and Distribution

• LR licensing priority to simplify
  relationship between providers and users -gt
  drafted generic contracts

• Contracts
• establish usage research / technology
  development
• protect data owners and their LRs
• available on www.elda.org/article1.html
• designed before CC licenses future mergings or
  joint designing?
• 500 have been signed

Contract model
LREC-2010 Workshop on Legal Issues
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Identification and Distribution

• More than 1,000 LRs catalogued and available
  ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources
  http//catalog.elra.org

Number of LRs within the ELRA Catalogue over the
years
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Distribution of Resources vs Usage

• ELRA has distributed over 3,500 LRs
• 48 research in academia
• 37 research and technology development in
  industry
• 16 evaluation
• Further 1,500 copies distributed within
  evaluation campaigns

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Distribution of Resources vs Usage
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The Universal Catalogue
the ELRA Catalogue
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The Universal Catalogue
the ELRA Catalogue

• Over 1,700 LRs compiled in the Universal
  Catalogue http//universal.elra.org
• Antechamber of ELRA Catalogue
• Window-shopping nature allows users to realise
  about existence of LRs for future availability?
  ELDA team helps to clear out legal situation
• New feature simplified collaboration form
  (following users feedback)
• Also related LREC Map initiative LR
  identification tool during LREC submission time
  (ELRA FlaReNet). See
• Calzolari, N., Soria, C., Del Gratta, R.,
  Goggi, S., Quochi, V., Russo, I., Choukri, K.,
  Mariani, J. and Piperidis S. The LREC 2010
  Resource Map. LREC 2010.

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Identification and Distribution The ELRA
Catalogue

• Two interesting novelties
• ELRAs implication in evaluation
• Distribution of evaluation packages (with
  definition of new type of use/agreement
   Evaluation Packages End-User Agreement  new
  pricing policy.
• Technology evaluation products, systems and
  applications
• ELRAs Catalogue of LRs for RD
• Easy and fast access to LRs dedicated to
  academic research at an affordable price
  http//catalogue.elra.info/retd

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Production of LRs

• Production or commissioning production
• Production
• Within the framework of European and
  international projects NEMLAR, Neologos,
  OrienTel, Speecon, C-ORAL-ROM, CHIL, TC-STAR,
  ESTER, MEDIA, MEDAR, PASSAGE, etc.
• In support of companies or institutions
  sometimes confidential
• ELRAs advisory role
• PCom
• VCom

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Production of LRs

• Current technological development demands more
  ambitious resources size, type of linguistic
  information, quality of the end-result
• These are main objectives for ELRA and have
  triggered
• LRs compiled in more than 25 languages
• High quality LRs strict validation
• Involved in every stage of production

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Production of LRs

• Production through ELDA
• (i) speech data for a variety of languages
  (e.g., Hindi, Korean, Colloquial Arabic(s),
  Canadian French, US Spanish, etc.),
• (ii) Broadcast News Speech Corpus for Arabic,
  French, Spanish, etc.,
• (iii) corpora for languages such as Catalan,
  Kazakh, Romanian, Turkish, etc., (iv) aligned
  textual corpora for Machine Translation in
  languages such as Arabic, Chinese, English,
  French, German, Spanish, etc.,
• (v) video annotations with audio transcriptions,
  
• (vi) collections of SMS data,
• (vii) recordings of Wizard-of-Oz based data for
  dialogue systems, etc. covering different types
  of LRs and for different technologies

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HLT Evaluation

• ELRA has ensured infrastructure for technology
  evaluation, also with web-based service platforms
• Through participation in European projects
  (CHIL, TC-STAR, CLEF) and in French national
  programmes (Technolangue)
• Collaborative and customized services for HLT
  Evaluation
• on-demand evaluation services
• customized LRs for laboratories and/or companies
• Important end-result evaluation packages
  compiled and made available
• they contain required DBs, tools, methodologies
  and protocols to conduct comparable experiments

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HLT Evaluation

• More than 20 technologies and over 40 eval
  packages are available on ELRA Catalogue.
• Some covered technologies
• Text processing Information retrieval, Question
  Answering, Machine Translation, Automatic
  Summarization, Parsing, Multilingual Text
  Alignment, Terminology Extraction,
• Speech processing Automatic Speech Recognition,
  Speech Synthesis, Speech Translation, Broadcast
  News Transcription, Acoustic Person Tracking,
  Acoustic Speaker Identification, Speech Activity
  Detection,
• Multi-modal interfaces Multimodal Person
  Tracking, Audiovisual Speech Recognition,
  Multimodal Person Identification.
• Reference Portal for HLT Evaluation
  http//hlt-evaluation.org

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Dissemination

• ELRA has increased its activities for the
  dissemination of information on LRs
• Speakers Corner for the researchers and
  developers of the area
• Events
• Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (7th
  edition) http//www.lrec-conf.org
• LangTech
• European LR and Technologies Forum (within
  FlaReNet)
• MEDAR Conferences
• Worshops of less-resourced languages (within
  LTC09)
• Language Resources and Evaluation Journal
  (Springer) http//www.springerlink.com/
• Newsletter
• Members News
• BLARK web site http//www.blark.org/ other web
  sites

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Today's Context...a New Landscape?

• New Visions.... Part of ELRAs success and
  evolution has implied facing and anticipating
  the realities/needs of the community
• History
• Why the community established agencies like LDC,
  ELRA and some others
• How things evolved and saw new players (BAS,
  CSLU, LDC India, GSK, etc.) emerging
• What their missions were and what it is today
• Is there a role for such organizations?
• Impact of new Instruments on the field
• How did the web and Internet shake up the whole
  structure
• (internet .... web ............. web 2.0)
• New facilities (personal pages, free /easy web
  hosting)
• Easiness to use new media , new means to store,
  share resources
• But did our LR consumption/ behaviour change
  that much?

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New Layered Approach with Distributed Services
Functionalities
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New Visions...

• This new vision is being implemented in
  collaboration with a number of experts
• International initiatives working to design this
  new vision
• PANACEA (www.panacea-lr.eu)
• Defining new legal frameworks...
• Cost-effectivenesss in LR production and
  automation
• Web-based factories
• META-NET (www.meta-net.eu/)
• NoE towards an open, integrated, secured and
  interoperable exchange
• Towards securing the largest Global Catalogue of
  LRs LDC, NICT, OLAC, etc...harmonise their
  catalogues with the Universal Catalogue. The LREC
  Map and other future Maps (from other conferences)

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Concluding Remarks

• Overview on latest developments in ELRAs
  services around
• Identification Distribution
• Evaluation
• Production
• Dissemination
• From early archiving and distribution to LR
  identification, collection, validation and
  distribution platform....
• ...with clear and well-established legal
  frameworks...
• ...enhancing work on evaluation (with new
  techniques, covering more technologies and
  languages, providing more evaluation packages,
  setting up the HLT Eval portal....)
• ... increasing work on LR production and its
  coverage
• ...big push to dissemination...

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Concluding Remarks

• ...encouraging international cooperation...
• ...after years of consolidation...ELRA is looking
  forward to the new challenges emerging from new
  trends...
• ...a new interoperable exchange is certainly on
  sight.

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Thank you for your attention