ELRC – European Language Resource Coordination

Project duration: 2015–2023

Project coordinator for Slovakia: Dr. Miroslav Zumrík

Annotation: The Department of the Slovak National Corpus, Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics (Slovak Academy of Sciences) has since 2015 been partaking in the international ELRC project – European Language Resource Coordination. The project was initiated by the European Commission with the goal of collecting valuable language resources in European languages, developing a modern system of automatic translation on the basis of these resources, and thus supporting multilingual communication across Europe. The project is carried out by an international consortium of research institution and commercial enterprises, together with representatives from 28 EU countries including Slovakia, as well as Norway and Iceland. The initiative is aimed at development of EU’s eTranslation service, which is available for public institutions, language experts, and lately even small and middle enterprises from the partner countries. In order to improve the translation service and to adapt it to users’ needs, authentic training language data is needed. A suitable language material for this are mono- and multilingual texts, translation memories, dictionaries and other available language resources, produced on daily basis within public institutions and commercial sphere in the partaking countries. The cooperation of consortium and individual national representatives (anchor points) should then, firstly, create a functional network of potential data providers and users of the eTranslation service. Secondly, it should also increase public awareness on today’s automatic translation, language technologies and AI. For these purposes, the ELRC consortium organizes informational workshops for representantives from public and state administration, as well as from research, education and business domains, in cooperation with national anchor points in all participating countries. In Slovakia, three workshops with international attendance had already taken place. The events’ intrinsic value follows, among other things, from contacts that are being created with foreign stakeholders in the domain of Natural Language Processing. The international dimension of the project can also be helpful with regard to the Slovak efforts to become a member in the important European research infrastructures CLARIN and DARIAH. The aim of the project ELDS – European Language Data Space, supported and initiated by the European Commission is to develop and extend the network of contacts previously gained within the project ELRC – European Language Resource Coordination.

Project homepage can be found here.

 

 

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