Press Release – Immediate

Paris, France, June 19, 2017

The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) is becoming an increasingly widespread persistent identifier

Since the deployment of ISLRN, 3 years ago, the number of Language Resources which were allocated an ISLRN has grown significantly to reach 2500+. These LRs include raw and annotated corpora, lexicons and dictionaries, speech resources (conversational, synthesis, etc.), evaluation sets and multimodal resources, and cover 219 distinct languages (including sign languages).

In the first place, the ISLRN system has been endorsed by two large data centers, namely ELRA (European Language Resources Association) and LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium) which team up to maintain jointly the assignment process. Other significant contributions come from institutions like the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the Resource Management Agency (RMA), the Institute for Applied Linguistics (IULA) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).

Moreover, authors are invited to quote the ISLRN of each Language Resource they are referring to in the paper(s) they are submitting to LREC Conferences, which makes the persistent identifier a key factor of the LR citation process.

 Background

As part of an international effort to document and archive the various Language Resource development efforts around the world, a system assigning ISLRNs was established in November 2013 and deployed in April 2014. The ISLRN is a unique persistent identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The establishment of ISLRNs was a major step in the networked and shared world of Human Language Technologies. Unique resources must be identified as they are, and meta-catalogues require a common identification format to manage data correctly. Therefore, Language Resources should carry identical identification schemes regardless their representations, their types and their storage place (hard drives, internet or intranet) (http://islrn.org/).

About ELRA

The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit-making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for Language Resources and promoting Human Language Technologies.

To find out more about ELRA, please visit the website: http://www.elra.info

References

LDC: https://www.ldc.upenn.edu

JRC: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/internet-surveillance-systems

RMA: http://rma.nwu.ac.za

UPF: http://www.iula.upf.edu  and https://www.upf.edu/web/universitat

LREC Conferences: www.lrec-conf.org

 Read also: Valérie Mapelli, Vladimir Popescu, Lin Liu and Khalid Choukri, Language Resource Citation: the ISLRN Dissemination and Further Developments, in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), Portorož, Slovenia: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2016/summaries/1251.html

Contact: mapelli@elda.org