European Language Resources Association

European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Type	Association
Founded	February 23rd 1995
Headquarters	France
Key people	Nicoletta Calzolari, President ; Khalid Choukri, Secretary-General
Website	www.elra.info

A not-for-profit organisation, the European Language Resources Association ("ELRA") is established under the law of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Its seat is in Luxembourg and its headquarters in Paris (France).

Activities

Since its foundation in 1995, the European Language Resources Association has been a conduit for the distribution of speech, written and terminology Language Resources (LRs) for the Human Language Technology (HLT), a key compound of IST. In order to do so, a number of technical and logistic, commercial (prices, fees, royalties), legal (licensing, Intellectual Property Rights, Management), and information dissemination issues had to be addressed. Since its foundation, ELRA's mission has enlarged slightly, broadening its objectives and responsibilities towards the HLT community. ELRA is also involved in the production, or commissioning of the production, of language resources through a number of initiatives, also actively committed to the evaluation of language engineering tools as well as to the identification of new resources. Finally, every other year, ELRA organizes a major conference LREC on language resources and evaluation. The latest edition took place in Istanbul, Turkey on May 21–27, 2012.

Mission

The mission of the Association is to promote language resources and evaluation for the Human Language Technology sector in all their forms and their uses, in a European context. Consequently, the goals are: to coordinate and carry out identification, production, validation, distribution, standardisation of languages resources, as well as support for evaluation of systems, products, tools, etc.

ELRA Board

Current members of the board of ELRA are:

Board officers
- President: Nicoletta Calzolari (Italy)
- Vice-presidents:
  - Nick Campbell (Ireland)
  - Isabel Trancoso (Portugal)
- Secretary: Maria Gavrilidou (Greece)
- Treasurer: Andrejs Vasiljevs (Latvia)
Board Members
- - Thierry Declerck (Germany)
  - Henk van den Heuvel (The Netherlands)
  - Marko Grobelnik (Slovenia)
  - Frédérique Segond (France)
ELRA Secretary General
- Khalid Choukri (France)

Antonio Zampolli Prize

The ELRA Board has created a prize to honour the memory of its first president, Professor Antonio Zampolli, a pioneer and visionary scientist who was internationally recognized in the field of computational linguistics and Human Language Technologies (HLT). He also contributed much through the establishment of ELRA and the LREC conference. To reflect Antonio Zampolli’s specific interest in our field, the Prize is awarded to individuals whose work lies within the areas of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to their advancement. So far, the Antonio Zampolli Prize was awarded to:

Frederick Jelinek, from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (USA), at LREC 2004, in Lisbon.
Christiane Fellbaum and George A. Miller, from Princeton University, Princeton (USA), at LREC 2006, in Genoa.
Yorick Wilks, from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Computer Science Department of the University of Sheffield (UK), at LREC 2008, in Marrakech.
Mark Liberman, from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (US), at LREC 2010, in Valletta.
Charles Fillmore and Collin F. Baker, from the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), University of California Berkeley (USA) and Oriental Committee for the Co-Ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques (Oriental COCOSDA), at LREC 2012, in Istanbul.

ELDA (Evaluations and Language Resources Distribution Agency)

To handle every issues related to the association affairs, ELDA, Evaluations & Language resources Distribution Agency, was created, as ELRA operational body. ELDA is responsible for the development and the execution of ELRA’s strategies and plans, and handles issues related to the distribution of language resources.

External links

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