Written by Darja Fišer
2024 was another successful year for CLARIN! We welcomed new members (Spain and South Africa), increased the number of service and knowledge centres (now a total of 73), and worked hard to achieve two of our key strategic goals: improving interoperability and findability.
A new CLARIN Resource Family was developed for Corpora of Disordered Speech. It deals with a specific kind of speech data that is related to the recordings of individuals with communication disorders. These corpora are invaluable for education and research, but are costly and hard to build and can be difficult to share, given privacy and confidentiality issues. This new Resource Family currently lists around 20 corpora that are made available via CLARIN, covering nearly 20 languages from all around the world, and greatly benefits the areas of clinical linguistics and phonetics, and speech and speech-language pathology.
The team working on the CLARIN Flagship project ParlaMint extended the corpus with parliamentary debates for Spain, Finland and the Basque Country, as well as metadata on speakers’ political orientation and roles, yielding a comparable and interoperable dataset comprising 29 parliaments, 24,000 speakers and 1 billion words. The entire dataset was also machine-translated into English and enriched with USAS semantic tags. This achievement turns the dream of researchers from many different disciplines to be able to compare parliamentary debates across political systems, national borders and language borders into a reality.
Twenty-five out of our 26 members and observers are connected to our Service Provider Federation, which makes it easier for academic users to get access to password-protected resources. On average, there have been 2909 logins per month via the central discovery service, a 21% increase compared to last year. We are proud to announce that the average uptime for our nine central services was 99.85%. We also launched two new initiatives: the CLARIN Forum, a platform for interactive discussions and a helpdesk, as well as a monthly Technical Open Hour, an informal session for technical developers from national nodes to get advice from the central technical team.
Events are a key way to showcase CLARIN’s offer to the wider community. CLARIN - in collaboration with committees, national consortia and other members of the network - organised a total of 48 scientific and training events, reaching around 2000 participants. National consortia organised more than 500 user involvement initiatives, which attracted around 11,000 participants.
A key event in our calendar is the CLARIN Annual Conference, this year taking place in Barcelona. With almost 200 in-person and 90 virtual participants, it acts as one of the key catalysts for knowledge exchange and collaboration in the CLARIN network. For the first time this year, the conference featured a dedicated session for industry partners, Building Bridges with Industry, which brought together academics, research infrastructure experts and industry representatives from the Spanish industry landscape specialising in AI and language technologies.
Thematic committees are instrumental in CLARIN’s efforts to promote knowledge and expertise, for instance by providing expert legal advice at events (CLARIN’s Legal and Ethical Issues Committee) or by expanding our collection of Best Practice Papers in the CLARIN Zotero library (Knowledge Infrastructure Committee).
Further key achievements that stimulate the exchange of knowledge include the launch of the Trainers’ Network, and the extension of the Learning Hub on the website, which now includes an Intro to CLARIN tutorial. Our five ambassadors performed outreach activities at a range of conferences and summer schools, participating in a total of 13 events and reaching about 700 users.
In the broader ecosystem, CLARIN is well positioned in the cluster of Social Sciences and Humanities. In December 2024, CLARIN was selected as a candidate node for the first wave of the Federation and Darja Fišer was elected as the new Chair of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cluster (SSHOC). In addition, CLARIN continues to closely collaborate with fellow RIs, especially DARIAH, CESSDA, and EHRI.
CLARIN ERIC is an active partner in the ERIC Forum, as well as European projects funded by the European Commission. CLARIN is currently active in seven EU projects: OSCARS, ATRIUM, ECHOES, OSTrails, EOSC Focus, FAIRCORE4EOSC, and ERIC Forum 2 – including both the majority of CLARIN’s central staff, as well as several national nodes from the CLARIN network, which further boosts activity, strengthens links, and ensures knowledge exchange between members of staff in CLARIN ERIC’s central office and the national nodes.
We look back on our achievements with pride, and are already looking forward to what promises to be an exciting new year ahead. For now, we wish everyone a holiday season filled with joy and rest (and maybe a nice LLM under the Christmas tree ).
To a resourceful 2025!