clarin: goals and structure of the project steven krauwer clarin coordinator utrecht institute of...

CLARIN: Goals and Structure of the Project

Steven KrauwerCLARIN Coordinator

Utrecht institute of Linguistics UiL-OTS (NL)

Steven Krauwer CLARIN - Riga 03-11-2008 2

Overview

• Problem & Mission• Some why-questions• Some who-questions• Overall plan

– Technical dimension– Language dimension– User dimension– Governance and legal

dimension

• What CLARIN is NOT about

• How we work• Funding• Structure• To conclude


The problem

• Much data in digital archives language based

• Only known to insiders

• Archives mostly unconnected

• Every archive has its own standards for storage and access

• Normally only simple retrieval of files (text, audio or video documents)

• Social sciences and humanities researchers are not language or speech technologists

• They are often not aware of the potential benefits of using language and speech technology

• Available tools are hard to use for non-specialist


The CLARIN Mission

What: • Create an

infrastructure that makes language resources and technology (LRT),available to scholars of all disciplines, especially social sciences and humanities (SSH)

How: • Unite existing digital

archives into a federation of archives with unified web access

• Provide existing language and speech technology tools as web services operating on language data in archives


Why a European infrastructure?

• too much fragmentation

• lack of coordination across countries

• lack of visibility• lack of

interoperability• lack of sustainability

• expertise exists but not in all countries

• language independent tools can be shared

• language dependent tools can often be ported

• most countries not able to bear the cost


Why now?

• Exponential growth of digital data

• Increasing maturity of language and speech technology:– high speed– large volumes– new research

questions

• Growing interest at EU level in research infrastructures (RI)

• RI Roadmap published in 2006 by ESFRI

• includes 35 accepted proposals for RIs

• CLARIN is one of them• all of them will get

funding for a 1-3 year preparatory phase


Who we are and where we come from

• The CLARIN consortium has now 32 partners from 22 EU and associated countries (and more on the waiting list)

• The CLARIN community has 142 members in 32 countries (Oct 2008)

• CLARIN is based on 4 earlier initiatives with many participants:– LangWeb – EARL – TELRI – (and later) DAM-LR


Who else do we need?

• Both our membership and our consortium are quite unbalanced:– Speech & multimodality underrepresented– Humanities other than linguistics

underrepresented– Social sciences underrepresented– Some countries still missing

• There is no money to extend the consortium but we have to fill these gaps


Overall plan for CLARIN

Preparatory phase:• 2008-2010• Put everything in

place

Construction phase:• 2011-2015• Build and populate

with tools and resources

Exploitation phase:• 2016-….• CLARIN in full

serviceBudget:• Prep phase

– 4.1 M€ from EC– ??? from countries

• Estimated budget until 2020: ca 200 M€


4-dimensional approachin the preparatory phase

First 3 years dedicated

• The technical dimension

• The language dimension

to the design:

• The user dimension

• The governance and legal dimension


Technical

• Technical specification of the infrastructure

• Construction of a prototype

• Validation on rich variety of– languages (>20)– resources– services

• Federation of existing archives

• Based on existing resources, tools

• Strong focus on interoperability standards

• Conversion of existing resources

• Encapsulation of existing tools


Languages

• Cover all languages spoken or studied in participating countries

• Representational and descriptive standards should be adequate and validated for all languages

• Same minimal coverage of basic resources and tools for all languages

• BLARK (Basic Language Resources Toolkit) to be defined and implemented (funds from other sources needed)


Language activities

• Survey of resources and tools, including:– encoding and

annotation data– quality indicators

• taxonomies and ontologies

• agreeing on common standards

Focus on• integration of tools• interoperability• usage scenarios• creating missing

essential resources• validating

specifications and prototype


User

• Users are SSH scholars (including linguists, translation experts)

• Do WE know what they need?

• Do THEY know what they need?

• Actions: – analyze past and

ongoing SSH projects

– user consultation– launch typical

example projects to show potential

– expertise centers– awareness actions


Legal

IPR issues• aim at open source,

but IPR for existing and future non-open resources must be accommodated

• federation of archives requires authentication, authorization and trust between archives

• aim at limited number of template license agreements for most common cases

• respect national legislation

• address ethical issues


Governance andFunding

Agree on e.g.:• Who is going to pay

for the construction and exploitation of the infrastructure

• How will it be managed

• How will it be coordinated with national policies

Actions:• Analyse best

practice in funding and management of transnational projects

• Prepare agreement between (now) 22 countries about long term joint funding of CLARIN


What CLARIN is NOT about

• building the infrastructure – we are just preparing it

• creating new resources – at this stage we want to use what is there and adapt it if necessary

• creating new applications – except maybe some essential tools or demonstrators

• focusing on the big languages – we find all languages equally important

• strengthening European industry – our target audience are SSH researchers, but we don’t want to exclude anyone


How we work (1)

Work packages:• WP1: Management

and coordination• WP2: Designing the

infrastructure and building the prototype

• WP3: Humanities overview

• WP5: Language resources and technology overview

• WP6: Dissemination• WP7: IPR and

business models• WP8: Construction

and exploitation agreement


How we work (2)

WP8Org&Legal Framework

WP7IPR, A&A,licensing

WP5LRT

Exploration

WP2Infrastructure

Prototype

WP3Humanities

Projects

1

26

7

4

5

3

8


How we work (3)

• Most tasks executed in Working Groups

• WGs consist of project partners & other experts (CLARIN is open!)

• Some WGs do work (e.g. build prototype), others create consensus

• Participation by others essential as e.g. standards cannot be imposedby a small group

• Unfortunately no EC funding available for WG participation – only reward is influence!


Funding & what to use it for

• From EC: 4.1 M€, used for generic, language independent tasks

• From countries: ??? M€, to be used for preparing CLARIN at the national level in every country:– build and organize local national CLARIN community– support for participation in working groups (e.g. travel)– validation tasks for own language(s)– creation or adaptation of essential resources– pilots and demonstrators & humanities projects– (co-)organisation of local or international events– preparing for future role (expertise centers, repositories)


Structure

• Executive Board, consisting of the 7 WP leaders plus a special representative to liaise with the humanities community (a.o. through the DARIAH sister project)

• Boards:– Scientific Board– Strategic

Coordination Board– International

Advisory Board

• Meetings (virtual or face to face):– Consortium meetings– Member meetings– Working group

meetings


More info

• CLARIN Website: http://www.clarin.eu

• CLARIN Office: [email protected]

• CLARIN Newsletter: http://www.clarin.eu/newsletter

• CLARIN Members: http://www.clarin.eu/members

clarin: goals and structure of the project steven krauwer clarin coordinator utrecht institute of...

Documents

steven krauwerclarin

language data

clarin consortium

existing language

language resources

digital archives language

clarin mission

clarin preparatory phase