Headquarters France Founded 23 February 1995 | Website www.elra.info Type of business Association | |
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Key people Henk van den Heuvel, President; Khalid Choukri, Secretary-General | ||
A not-for-profit organisation, the European Language Resources Association ("ELRA") is established under the law of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Its seat is in Luxembourg and its headquarters in Paris (France).
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Activities
Since its foundation in 1995, the European Language Resources Association 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 also 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. The set up of the identification number ISLRN endorsed by NLP12 in 2013, is the most recent initiative led by ELDA to enhance the identification of Language Resources and their citation in publications. Finally, every other year, ELRA organizes a major conference LREC, the International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.
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. Information Dissemination is also part of ELRA's missions which is carried through both the organisation of the conference LREC and the Language Resources and Evaluation Journal edited by Springer.
ELRA Board
Current members of the board of ELRA are:
Antonio Zampolli Prize
The ELRA Board has created a prize to honour the memory of its first president, Professor Antonio Zampolli, a pioneer and visionary scientist who was internationally recognized in the field of computational linguistics and Human Language Technologies (HLT). He also contributed much through the establishment of ELRA and the LREC conference. To reflect Antonio Zampolli’s specific interest in our field, the Prize is awarded to individuals whose work lies within the areas of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to their advancement. So far, the Antonio Zampolli Prize was awarded to: