ELRA plays a leading role in distribution and sharing of Language Resources (LRs) within the Human Language Science and Technology Community. Over the last decade, ELRA has compiled a large list of resources that constituted its Catalogue of LRs. ELRA has negotiated distribution rights with the LR owners and made such resources available under fair conditions and a clear legal framework. Following this initiative, ELRA has also worked on LR discovery and identification with a dedicated team that investigated and listed existing and valuable resources in its “Universal Catalogue”, a list of resources that could be negotiated on a case by case basis. At LREC 2010, ELRA introduced the LRE Map, an inventory of LRs that were described in LREC papers. Such a huge inventory listed by the authors themselves constituted a first “community-built” catalogue of existing or emerging resources, constantly enriched and updated at major conferences.

Considering the latest trends on easing the sharing of LRs, from both legal and commercial points of view, ELRA is taking a major role in META-SHARE, a large European open infrastructure for sharing LRs. Such an infrastructure will allow LR owners, providers and distributors to distribute their LRs through an additional and cost-effective channel. Anticipating users’ expectations, ELRA has decided to offer a large number of resources for free for Academic research use. Such an offer will consist of several sets of speech, text and multimodal resources that will be regularly released, for free, as soon as legal aspects are cleared.

Whenever this is permitted by our licences, please feel free to use these resources for deriving new resources and depositing them with the ELRA catalogue for community re-use.

In line with this strategy and spirit, ELRA will continue to negotiate and enter into agreements to offer more free resources. Follow our announcements for this purpose.