European Language Resources Association history and recent developments

This paper aims at briefly describing the rationale 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 in 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 produce and provide such resources effectively 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 European national agencies to ensure the availability of speech, text, and terminology resources.