CLARIN— Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure and its Swiss node CLARIN-CH: supporting the scientific community using language data in the context of Open Science
Creators: name: Grisot, Cristina
name: Craevschi, Alexandru
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: language resources; language technology; research infrastructure; Open Science; CLARIN-CH

description: Poster at SwissText 2023, Neuchâtel, June 2023 In this poster, we showcase how CLARIN – a well-established research infrastructure (RI) and a landmark of the European Strategy Forum on RIs ESFRI – and its newly established Swiss node CLARIN-CH, support the scientific community using language data in the context of Open Science. CLARIN is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI), which provides accessibility to all European digital language resources and tools through a single sign-on online environment. CLARIN centres share with the community their expertise, their language resources, tools, and provide a large array of services. Specifically, the CLARIN community offers long-term solutions and technology services for deploying, connecting, analysing and sustaining digital language data and tools. To connect a variety of resources and data that are available, certain metadata norms were developed – component metadata (CMDI). CMDI revolves around XML schemas to make resources easily searchable and adaptable for automated metadata parsing. The XML schemas are stringent enough to make them usable for general purposes but also flexible enough to adapt to each case. Furthermore, CLARIN supports scholars who want to engage in pioneering data-driven research, contributing to a multilingual European Research Area. An example is the ParlaMint corpus, which contributes to the creation of comparable and uniformly annotated multilingual corpora (more than 17 languages) of parliamentary sessions. Finally, by offering resources in OA and promoting the curation and depositing of data in alignment with the requirements for the interoperability of data and services, CLARIN paved the way for large-scale data sharing and increased reuse of resources. In Switzerland, CLARIN-CH is a cross-institutional national network of scholars working on language related issues in various sub-disciplines, which started in December 2020. Its governance is ensured by the CLARIN-CH consortium of Swiss higher education and research institutions, which is fully funded by the member institutions. The consortium works in partnership with the Linguistic Research Infrastructure LiRI (UZH), which provides data and language technology services, and the Language Repository of Switzerland (LaRS/SWISSUbase), which is a national FAIR-complaint repository for linguistic data. Among the objectives of the CLARIN-CH Consortium are: (i) to bring together the research community using language resources and encourage collaborations by implementing cross-institutional working groups (WGs), such as <em>Open Research Data projects for linguistics data </em>and<em> Management of sensitive data and legal aspects for linguistic data in </em>Switzerland, and to foster the federation of resources and expertise at the national and the European levels. Regarding the former, CLARIN-CH WGs target specific needs of individual sub-areas with respect to the development of digital language resources and analysis tools, and their incorporation into the CLARIN-CH infrastructure. For example, the UpLORD project (leading house: UZH) focuses on: (I) upgrading workflows and interoperability of Swiss RIs for linguistic data, i.e., LiRI and SWISSUbase/LaRS, (ii) documenting and promoting best practices, (iii) raising awareness and training about ORD practices in the context of teaching, research and publishing, and (iv) building a robust practice of data curation. Regarding the latter objective, in collaboration with LiRI, CLARIN-CH works towards the interoperability of Swiss corpora with the European CLARIN infrastructure by developing a metadata schema compatible with the CMDI, the construction of an OA national corpus platform to allow complex queries in a variety of corpora and of an annotation tool for multimodal data, and targets the establishment of knowledge centers to value Swiss scholars’ expertise in language technology and language sciences. CLARIN and its Swiss node CLARIN-CH collaborate with other national and European RIs, such as DARIAH and its Swiss node DARIAH-CH, to further develop the Social Sciences and Humanities cluster and represent it in the European Open Science Cloud EOSC. By getting actively involved in CLARIN, Swiss scholars benefit of: (i) an increased visibility of their assets (research projects, data, tools, methodologies, expertise, etc.), (ii) a better access to European digital language resources and cutting-edge language technologies, (iii) involvement in European and national collaborative research projects, (iv) access to numerous funding opportunities (call for EU-funded projects, workshops, summer schools, mobility grants).