Press Release – Immediate
Paris, France, October 20, 2017

ReTeLe & ELRA join forces

The European Language Resource Association (ELRA) is pleased to announce its support for the Spanish Network of Excellence ReTeLe, the Network of Resources for Language Technologies.

ReTeLe aims at promoting all activities around language resources (LRs) for the languages in Spain (Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish). This network of excellence supports the production and availability of multilingual language resources for language technology developers. ReTeLe coordinates providers of LRs, identifies needs for covering the languages in Spain and promotes the sharing of LRs as open linked data, thus encouraging their re-usability.

ReTeLe contributes to the full deployment of language technology applications. For that purpose, ReTeLe has collaborated with the Spanish Plan de Impulso de las Tecnologías del Lenguaje (Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology) and the European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) (http://www.lr-coordination.eu/), an action whose objective is to identify and collect language data from the public administration in the EU Member States to fuel MT@EC, the Machine Translation developed by the EC, and improve its performance.

Among the network’s different activities, there is also the support to existing catalogues of language resources for the languages in Spain, as well as their interoperability through the creation of a portal for describing LRs (http://catalogo.retele.linkeddata.es/). This description is done according to agreed metadata standards, which comprises the recommendation of using the ISLRN (International Standard Language Resource Number) for the identification of language resources. These initiatives encourage LR providers to maximize the visibility of language resources in a simple manner so as to support potential users in their search for data. The metadata used will be available as linked data and exportable to other European catalogues, such as that of META-SHARE (http://metashare.elda.org/) and ELRC-SHARE (https://elrc-share.ilsp.gr/).

ELRA, also involved in these initiatives, supports ReTeLe’s work and engages in collaborations towards the dissemination of ReTeLe’s activities. Through its long experience in the world of LRs and, in particular, in their cataloging (http://catalog.elra.info/), ELRA can provide guidance and help so as to achieve the objectives of the network.

Founding Members

ReTeLe is coordinated by Prof. Asunción Gómez Pérez, from the Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and is financed by the Ministry of Finances and Competitivity in Spain. The network comprises 14 members coming from academic and research institutions in Spain.

For further information on the ReTeLe network, please visit the following website: http://retele.linkeddata.es/

Contact: http://retele.linkeddata.es/web/guest/contact

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