Looking back, while moving forward
The end of the year is nearing and my first 100 days as Executive Director are just over. I would like to thank all of you for turning my introduction into the CLARIN community and the treasures that have been collected into such an encouraging experience.
There is such a wealth of talent and expertise: among the researchers and developers, among our allies in the domain of data infrastructure and among the user communities that want to engage with what CLARIN has to offer. In the years to come the potential for impact will undoubtedly become more and more apparent. As new countries are likely to join in the coming year and important steps will be taken to increase the diversity of user communities involved in our activities, 2016 can be expected to be a year with many good tidings and promising achievements that will help to build the future of CLARIN.
On behalf of CLARIN : thanks for your contributions in 2015 and enjoy the X-mas holidays!
Franciska de Jong
Executive Director
Using CLARIN in research
There will be 4 workshops over the next two years as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project, which will focus on using CLARIN in research, on the following topics:
- Exploring the past in oral history archive materials;
- Analysis of social media;
- Linking and exploring parliamentary records;
- Working with digital collections of newspapers.
To ensure that we make a success of these events, we need to draw on the collective knowledge of the CLARIN network to identify successful applications of language and speech technology in these domains.
What is happening at....CLARIN Slovenia
CLARIN.SI our Slovenian consortium has been engaged in a lot of activity these last few months, especially in the area of user engagement.
In November and December some very successful conferences were held in Slovenia. From Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, 180 students and professors were introduced to working with Slovene language corpora and other internet-based resources or given an introduction to WebAnno. Furthermore, the first steps were taken in producing a manually annotated multilingual comparable corpus of tweets of three South Slavic languages, which will be an extremely useful resource for studying user-generated content in a multilingual and multicultural setting. These events also highlighted the importance of cooperation between CLARIN.SI and the related initiatives in the region, leading to highly synergic effects. Read more about the CLARIN.SI activities in their blog article.
Italian users connected to federated login
71 Italian Identity Providers have been added to the Service Provider Federation. This means that all users with an account at one of these academic organisations can use federated login to access the password-protected CLARIN services, e.g. the recently added Corpuscle corpus analysis system.
New CLARIN C centre: CoCoON
The French CoCoON centre recently registered as a C centre. Their language resources are available via the Virtual Language Observatory.
B2SAFE tutorial material available
and CLARIN have organized a tutorial on the usage of B2SAFE in Utrecht on 7 December. All training materials, including video recordings of the presentations, are now available online.
WATCH THIS!
Andreas Blätte's keynote talk at the CLARIN Annual Conference 2015
Andreas Blätte's talks about parliamentary speeches of migrants and speeches about migration in his keynote talk at the CLARIN Annual Conference 2015.
EVENTS & CALLS
EUDAT User Forum
EUDAT invites research infrastructure and community representatives, domain researchers, community managers and data managers to attend its User Forum taking place in Rome, 3-4 February 2016. This event focuses on users from multiple disciplines with research data management needs. EUDAT offers a series of pan-European research data solutions (replication, preservation, publication, staging). These services will be discussed in the context of research domains with a focus on the domain specific and cross disciplinary requirements.
RDA Seventh Plenary Meeting
Hosted and co-organised by the Japan Science and Technology Agency under the theme “Making data sharing work in the era of Open Science” the 7th Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary meeting will be held in Tokyo, Japan from the 1st to the 3rd of March 2016.
The 7th Plenary is built around the
Working and Interest group meetings, and will also see the release of a new set of group outputs with sessions dedicated to adoption and success stories. Participants who are new to RDA will have a chance to learn about it and how to get involved during the RDA for Newcomers session on February 29th.
RDA P7 Special. Opportunities for you to attend RDA Plenary 7th!
RDA Europe is running two programmes to facilitate participation of 20 European RDA members to attend the 7th RDA Plenary meeting in Toyko, Japan. 10 RDA Early Career Researchers & Scientists working on data and 10 active RDA members are sought.
5th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL2016)
Call for papers
Since its establishment in 2012, the Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL) workshop series has become the major forum for presenting, discussing and disseminating technologies, vocabularies, resources and experiences regarding the application of Semantic Web standards and the Linked Open Data paradigm to language resources in order to facilitate their visibility, accessibility, interoperability, reusability, enrichment, combined evaluation and integration.
The 5th edition of the workshop series will take place in Portorož, Slovenia on May 24, 2016 and is co-located with LREC.
The call for papers is now open. The submission deadline is February 8, 2016
COLING 2016
First call for papers
The 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2016) will be held in Osaka, Japan, at the Osaka International Convention Center (OICC) (located in Nakanoshima in the center of Osaka) on December 11-16, 2016.
The conference will cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to natural language and computation. It will include full papers (presented as oral presentations or posters), demonstrations, tutorials, and workshops. Oral and poster presentations of full papers will not be distinguished in the proceedings of the conference.
COLING 2016 invites the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics.