We offer the honour to open the issue this time to Bente Maegaard and Steven Krauwer, because we want to emphasize the significant activity that was recently pursued inside our community towards the creation of a legal form to the CLARIN entity. The newly framework approved by the Commission to support research infrastructures related activities is called ERIC and this is what we are heading towards, with an application that has to be submitted in the middle of 2010. Research infrastructures in linguistics seem to develop widely, not only in Europe, and a signal from USA is brought by Koenraad de Smedt. He reports on the Cyberlink 2009 workshop, held recently at the start of cyberinfrastructure – the American term for research infrastructures – project at UC Berkeley.
Then, continuing our tradition of presenting a research in domains that need the help of CLARIN, Hanne Fersøe offers a very interesting article on a consortium project studying hearing loss, showing how sound and language technologies could feed advanced techniques intended to develop hearing aid devices.
The central pages of the issue, as always intended to present recent important CLARIN events, are contributed by Peter Wittenburg, Antti Arppe, Pirjoleanna Forsstrom and Nicoletta Calzolari. NEERI, the Networking Event for European Research Infrastructures + Standards was organised by CLARIN and hosted by the University of Helsinki, in September this year. By its attendance and the diversity of themes approached (among which: long-term preservation, persistent identifiers, metadata frameworks, semantic interoperability, grid computing and federation technologies used in CLARIN, ethical and legal issues) this workshop configured as one of the most significant events organised by CLARIN since its inception.
We wanted to host in this Newsletter a presentation of one traditional NLP event, that grew in significance over the years, due to the attentive selection of the hot topics of this so rapidly developing field, the quality of the papers presented and the inspired association with a number of workshops: the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing. So we invited two of its main organisers, Galia Angelova and Ruslan Mitkov, to author an article describing this September event, held in Borovets, Bulgaria.
Then, Felix Sasaki signs a short article bringing into attention a major topic of interest for the infrastructure that we want to build: the standards to support the diversity of languages, and the language identification software that will have to bridge the language resource information and the Web information space.
And finally, dear reader, you will find a report, written by Ineke Shuurman, on the activities developed by CLARIN-Vlaanderen on the Dutch language, spoken essentially in the northern part of Belgium, Flanders, and partly in Brussels.
Enjoy your reading!
