About CLARIN

CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastucture) is a research infrastructure of language resources and its technology.

It offers some services to the different communities of linguists, the humanities scholars and to the society.

The mission of CLARIN to create a Pan European infrastructure that will boost humanities research in a multicultural and multilingual area as Europe is and facilitate a multilingual and multicultural education in schools, colleges and universities.

By language resources and its technology they mean all knowledge sources based on written or spoken language and the tools to carry out operations on such language material. There are some characteristics about what CLARIN language resources and technologies are:

• Texts of all sorts which can be digitized medieval sources, web-sites, newspapers, digitized books etc.
• Multimedia recordings (audio/video) and time series recorded during communication like data glove or eye tracking.
• Various types of manually or automatically created annotations on texts, media streams etc.
• Tools such as aligners, speech recognizers, tokenizers, part-of-speech taggers, parsers, manual annotators, viewers etc.
• Various types of knowledge sources encapsulating knowledge about resources and languages such as metadata descriptions, GIS, lexica, concept registries, ontologies etc.

The Language Resource and Technology community is working on the content of the resources and apply specific tools tailored to their research interests, the language resource community is interested in linguistic content, structures, formal semantics etc.

Sources:

Common Language Resources and Technology Infraestructure (CLARIN). (2008). Retrieved March 31, 2008 from http://www.clarin.eu/

What is Language Technology?

Language technology or human language technology comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech. These systems must be based on some knowledge of human language.

There are some software products that have some knowledge of human language. Such of these products are going to change our lives because they are urgently needed for improving human-machine interaction since the main obstacle in the interaction between human been and computer is a communication problem. Today’s computers do not understand our language so there are softwares which can listen and speak. These current advances in the recognition of spoken language permit computers help people communicate each other.

In spite of the fact that people have different mother tongues, computational linguistics are trying to create software systems which simplify the work of human translators.

The rapid growth of the Internet and the emergence of the information society poses exciting new challenges to language technology  because of the increasing multilinguality of the web.

The future of language technology will be determined by the growing need for user-friendly software.

Sources:

Language Technology Lab. DFKI-LT – What is Language Technology?  by Hans Uszkoreit. 2008, DFKI, Germany). Retrieved March 28th from http://www.dfki.de/lt/lt-general.php