It seems that, as we approach the end of the project, the agenda of CLARIN-related activities and events becomes more and more heavy. If you go through this double issue, even from the tip of the finger, you will be surprised to see how many important things has happened from the beginning of this year, and at what speed we are moving forward. In the following we will browse for you the content of this CLARIN Newsletter, the double issue 9-10, not necessarily in the order the articles are included.
First, we are happy to bring to the CLARIN readers a word from the very heart of the European Commission, there where the strategic decisions are being taken in Language Technology. Kimmo Rossi is giving the fresh and very welcome news of a hot autumn and winter: very generous calls of the ICT Work Programme are waiting for us behind a door that we are invited to open and 2011-2012 will bring even more amazing initiatives.
Then, we announce new launches of programmes, projects and collaborations. In Nederlands, the CLARIN-NL Project has received an extremely generous financing, which could be taken as an example by many CLARIN member states, news offered to us by Jan Odijk. António Branco and Marko Tadić relate about the recent launch of the Portuguese CLARIN in Lisbon. The same António, together with Vera Lúcia Strube de Lima, Thiago Pardo and Steven Krawer, describe, from the position of principal actors, another important event involving the Portuguese language, the PROPOR conference, which can be seen as initiating a promising collaboration of CLARIN on the other side of the Atlantic, in Brasil. From Kaunas, we hear the voice of Rūta Marcinkevičienė, bringing to the CLARIN community news from Lithuania, the new member of CLARIN, and its remarkable progresses in HLT.
Then, as in all our previous issues, a series of articles relate about CLARIN activities. The new face and functionalities of the CLARIN website are commented by Corina Dima, its main implementer (WP6). Ville Oksanen, Krister Lindén and Hanna Westerlund, a Finish team (WP8), present the principal LRs distribution licenses standardized within the project. And the state of the art in speech technologies and how are they related to language learning CALL systems, as possible part of the CLARIN infrastructure, is contributed by Catia Cucchiarini.
Finally, a number of articles present the main LR&T events in Europe within the last few months. The LREC series of conferences, due to a rich heritage and an almost perfect conceptualization and organization, has become one of the major global events of our community, attended now by 1,246 registered participants at the main conference and workshops. Less known, perhaps even funny, stories from the recent Malta event are brought forward by the chair of the local organization committee, Mike Rosner, while the conference main chair, Nicoletta Calzolari, together with Claudia Soria and Riccardo Del Gratta, describe one of the most important side effects of the Malta LREC – the
LRT Map. A great idea, which,
will certainly have important consequences in the making of a global thesaurus of language resources and tools. Then, the already significant
CICLing, held this year for the first time in Europe, in Iaşi, is presented by its very inventor, Alexander Gelbukh, and the principal local organizer, Corina Forăscu. One of the most important CLARIN meetings since the beginning of the project was the join gathering of its boards, which
included the Executive Board, the Scientific Board, the Strategic Coordination Board and the International Advisory Board. The coordinator of the project, Steven Krauwer, is giving a short presentation, with a stress on the advances towards establishing the CLARIN
ERIC, the new
framework under which the project will function starting with the construction phase. You will find a word, then, on the recent join meeting
of CLARIN and FLaReNet in Stockholm, by Rolf Carlson, Kjell Elenius and David House. The discussions focused on speech and multimodality, as well as on the best practices that would enable to integrate tools and to achieve uniformity in annotation. You can find also a very short survey of the LT Days that took place in Luxembourg, reported by Marko Tadić. Enjoy reading it! We would be happy to know your opinion, your news, your suggestions. Write us!
