Title: European Language Resources Association History and Recent developments

Abstract: This abstract aims at briefly describing the rational behind the foundation of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) in 1995 and its activities since then. We would like to focus on the issues involved for making language resources available to different sectors of the language engineering community. ELRA is presented as a conduit for the distribution of speech, written and terminology databases, enabling all players to have access to Language Resources (LRs). In order to effectively produce and provide such resources to research and development groups in academic, commercial and industrial environments, it is necessary to address legal, logistic and other practical issues. This has already been done by ELRA through the establishment of an operational infrastructure that capitalizes on the investments of the European Commission and other European National agencies to ensure the availability of Speech, Text, and Terminology resources.

ELRA's initial mission was to set up a centralized Not-for-profit organization for the collection, distribution, and validation of speech, text, terminology resources and tools. In order to play this role of a central repository, ELRA had to address issues of various natures such as technical and logistic problems, commercial issues (prices, fees, royalties), legal issues (licensing, Intellectual Property Rights IPR), information dissemination (to act as a clearing house).

This mission is tuned from time to time to anticipate future requirements. As of today, this can be reflected by the following tasks:
* The handling of legal issues related to the availability of Language Resources.
* The identification of useful resources.
* The distribution activities and Pricing policy.
* The validation and Quality assessment.
* The commission of the production of needed Language Resources & Market watch.
* The information dissemination, Promotion and Awareness.
* The Evaluation

After almost six years of activity, ELRA has managed to make available, worldwide, a large set of marketable resources. ELRA handled the legal issues through generic license agreements and IPR manuals that were made widely available. A set of validation manuals (in particular for telephone-based speech resources) have been produced and widely distributed.

ELRA is now in the position to establish close partnership and Joint-ventures. It is of paramount importance that ELRA reaches fruitful agreements with other regional organizations in order to achieve, all together, a better streamlining of efforts in the development of new Language Resources that are of interest to "local" and "global" players.

As for the validity of the existence of ELRA for the distribution of language resources, the sales statistics from last year speak for themselves. The 2000 fiscal report indicates a total of 266 sales for the year. Of these 266 purchases, 132 were specifically speech databases, 131 written and 3 terminology.

The association now has a good number of members from all over the world who benefit, in particular, from substantial discounts on the resources presented in the catalogue. Each member belongs to one of three possible colleges (speech, written and terminology) in accordance with their principal area of interest. Legal and contractual assistance are also included in the membership as ELRA also managed to simplify the relationship between providers and users (customers) by drafting generic agreements that specify the responsibilities and duties of each party when licensing a language resource. 119 agreements with providers of language resources have been secured by ELRA since 1996, preventing users and providers from spending their time with contractual agreements.

In order to add value to the resources it distributes, ELRA also initiated the production of validation manuals for each resource type, namely spoken resources, written corpora, lexica and terminology resources. Both on-line and hardcopy versions of the validation manuals for written corpora and lexica are available; LR providers are encouraged to use these manuals to specify or validate their databases.

The highlight of 1998 for the association was the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) which took place in Granada, Spain. Organised every 2 years, it took place in Athens, Greece, last year. The next one is scheduled for 2002, in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain. The LREC conference was initiated by ELRA and is organized in co-operation with other national and international associations and consortia. With over 500 attendees, the first two conferences were a major success, when one considers that it addresses the specific topic of language resources and evaluation. We hope that the next one, LREC 2002, will also be a main event within the HLT community.

Regarding its membership: at the beginning only institutions legally registered in Europe were able to join ELRA. Since 1997 this restriction has been lifted and any legally registered organization can join the association. Full membership, with voting rights, is available only to organizations legally established in Europe. During the General Assembly of 28 November 1997, the members agreed to the proposal of the Board to modify the annual membership fee as follows:
Non-profit making organizations 750 EURO European small/medium-sized companies < 50 employees 1000 EURO European profit making organizations >= 50 employees 1500 EURO Non-European profit making organizations 5000 EURO

As stated above, ELRA has been entrusted with a crucial mission: to ensure that Language Resources needed by Language Engineering players are made available when they already exist or to produce them in a cost-effective frame. It is of paramount importance that regional organizations emerge and co-operate between themselves with respect to the issues described herein. The main common task would be to achieve, all together, a better streamlining of efforts in the development of new Language Resources that are of interest to "local" and "global" players.


E-mail address: "choukri@elda.fr"
WEB site: "http://www.elda.fr"