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Sweden joined CLARIN ERIC

Submitted by Arjan van Hessen on

We are happy to announce that Sweden has now joined CLARIN .

Sweden has been active for several years in preparing for setting up components for a language resources infrastructure; and now has officially joined the European consortium. Sweden contributes a very strong and broad national consortium, SWE-CLARIN, with currently the following institutions as members – one service-providing centre (aiming at type B), one future infrastructure-centre and seven future knowledge centres:

 

Språkbanken @ University of Gothenburg (Dept of Swedish) (service-providing centre, national CLARIN coordinator)

  • Swedish National Data Service @University of Gothenburg (Infrastructure centre)
  • Digisam @ National Archives (knowledge centre)
  • The Speech Group @ KTH (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Dept of Speech, Music and Hearing) (knowledge centre)
  • Language Council of Sweden @Institute for Language and Folklore (knowledge centre)
  • CILTLab @ Linköping University (Type K – knowledge centre)
  • The Humanities Laboratory @ Lund University (knowledge centre)
  • Computational Linguistics and Sign Language @ Stockholm University (Dept of Linguistics) (knowledge centre)
  • Computational Linguistics @ Uppsala University (Dept of Linguistics and Philology) (knowledge centre)

Sweden will contribute in particularly close collaboration with other Scandinavian countries: Denmark (ERIC member), Norway (ERIC observer), and Finland (active consortium with contributions to CLARIN but yet without official status).

Sweden comes well prepared: besides much expertise in language technology – applicable not only to Swedish – provided by the university partners, and strong connections to the national linguistic and cultural heritage institutions through the two non-university partners, it also contributes large speech resources and speech processing technology at KTH, extensive social science survey datasets at SND, and billions of words of richly annotated modern and historical corpora – including parallel corpora – as well as extensive Swedish and multilingual lexical resources and language processing tools at Språkbanken, which are already embedded in a strong infrastructural environment and widely used.

With Sweden a full member of CLARIN, we expect that the Swedish research community will be able to take part directly in addressing the challenges that CLARIN is facing, and – importantly – to participate in important decisions on, for example, standards, formats and intellectual property rights directly relevant to the goals of CLARIN – the outspoken vision to bring order in a fragmented world of a variety of language resources. Lars Borin, the leader of the Swedish CLARIN consortium, says: “The situation is not different in Sweden compared to the rest of Europe and the world. Within Sweden there are a number of advanced language tools and resources, but they are indeed fragmented, and in different formats and often incompatible. Now a part of CLARIN, the SWE-CLARIN partners will be active in turning fragmented technology into stable and accessible services that can be used by a much wider range of users than today, representing a range of humanities and social-science disciplines requiring access to textual and speech data in many modern and historical European language varieties.”