TR05: The European Language Resources Association

Translation Issues

1-98 (March 1998)

European Union

TR05: The European Language Resources Association

Promoting Language Resources in Europe

The Association

The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) was founded in February 1995 as a membership association, by a number of leading academic and private-sector bodies in co-operation with the European Commission. As a non-profit making organisation, ELRA aims to serve as a focal point for the collection, marketing, distribution and licensing of language resources, as well as being a provider of general information in the field of language engineering. Day-to-day operations are run by the European Language Distribution Agency (ELDA), while the strategies and plans of ELRA are set by the member-elected board.

The Services

Out of the services offered by ELRA, the most appreciated is the large collection of language resources, available for purchase by both members and non-members. Examples of the ELRA resources are speech databases, monolingual and multilingual lexica, aligned and multilingual corpora, and terminological data in monolingual and multilingual forms. At present there are about 500 different items being offered, with about 70 in Speech, 120 in Text and 360 in Terminology.

Other services are the publication of a quarterly newsletter, with news and information from the LE community and industry. Anyone with queries on resources or related topics may turn to ELRA for help and information. Also work on creating validation manuals for the different resource areas is being conducted under ELRA supervision, to be used as quality assessments for language resources.

The Members

Membership is open to all organisations or companies, public as well as private, though voting rights in the General Assembly are restricted only to European members. The annual membership fees are diverse:

750 ECU for European non-profit making organisations,
1000 ECU for European profit-making SMEs with less than 50 employees,
1500 ECU for European profit making organisations with 50 or more employees), and
5000 ECU for non-European profit making organisations.

Today, the group of members incorporate organisations from many parts of the world, with nearly all the countries of the European Union being represented. The members are all from different sections of the language engineering area: there are companies and commercial organisations from the language engineering industry, and research laboratories and institutes, universities and other academic bodies involved in language research.

The Future

The association is now able to provide both resource providers and consumers with excellent support for commercialisation and access to resources. In the future, work will continue in gaining new resources for the association and refining solutions to legal issues. However, the focus of effort is shifting away from those of the past (establishing infrastructure, gathering resource, and membership) toward distribution and active marketing of resources. In addition the association will initiate its planned programme to validate and quality control the resources being distributed.

For further details, please contact:

ELRA/ELDA
87, Avenue d’Italie
75013 PARIS, FRANCE
+33 1 45 86 53 00 (voice)
+33 1 45 86 44 88 (fax)
elra@calvanet.calvacom.fr
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html

© TC Forum 1998-2001 - http://www.tc-forum.org - file last updated 21 MAY 99
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