Press Release – Immediate
Paris, France, January 16, 2017

The Institute for Applied Linguistics (IULA) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) adopts the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) initiative

The Institute for Applied Linguistics (IULA) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) is now a certified provider to the ISLRN system. This means that IULA can apply for ISLRNs on behalf of the developers of the data that is managed and distributed via the IULA network. IULA has already submitted 107 language resources to the ISLRN. These include monolingual and multilingual written corpora and lexica for the languages spoken in Spain (Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Galician), as well as other European languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian), and Esperanto. The meta-information for these language resources is also available on the ISLRN website with a broad international audience.

Background
As part of an international effort to document and archive the various language resource development efforts around the world, a system of assigning ISLRNs was established in November 2013. 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 independent of their representations, whatever their types and wherever their physical locations (on hard drives, internet or intranet) (http://islrn.org/).

About IULA
The Institute for Applied Linguistics (IULA), created in 1994 at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, is a research and training center that gets together about 50 researchers. The group IULA Technologies of Language Resources (TRL) is working on the creation, development and application of technologies related to the acquisition, production, management, validation and evaluation of Language Resources as required by Language Technologies applications such as Machine Translation, Information Extraction, Text Analytics, etc. Resources produced by TRL are licensed under Creative Commons and they are available for direct download at UPF's eRepository (http://repositori.upf.edu/handle/10230/5963).   

To find out more about IULA and UPF, please visit the following websites: http://www.iula.upf.edu/ and https://www.upf.edu/web/universitat

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

Contact: info@elda.org