About us

In brief

CLARIN-PL

CLARIN-PL is a Polish scientific consortium, part of the European Research Infrastructure CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). It is made up of six research units that develop electronic language resources and tools for working with large collections of texts in Polish. This infrastructure provides modern digital solutions in conducting research for scientists (mainly representing the humanities and social sciences). The use of CLARIN software and apparatus is free of charge, and the maintenance of the Polish infrastructure node – the CLARIN-PL Language Technology Centre at the Wrocław University of Technology) is financed by the Ministry of National Education (Poland). The Centre coordinates the development of resources and tools, ensures the maintenance of technical facilities and conducts activities aimed at popularizing language engineering solutions in the academic environment by organizing workshops and consultations as well as by editing training materials.

CLARIN ERIC

The European Research Infrastructure CLARIN ERIC was established in 2012. Its aim is to provide citizens (especially scientists, lecturers and students) with specialized data collections, knowledge and technical capabilities to conduct research involving the processing of large collections of texts in natural languages. This infrastructure is dispersed – this means that its centres are scattered in various locations, mainly in Europe, but also in the USA and South Africa. (MORE ABOUT CLARIN-ERIC)

Vision and mission

CLARIN VISION

The priority objective of CLARIN-PL is to provide Polish scientists with all the resources needed to conduct research that requires the use of methods for processing large collections of texts. Our infrastructure is unique on a global scale, because it was created especially for the Polish language and provides user-specific solutions ensuring precise results for research on texts prepared in this language.

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CLARIN’s goal is to make linguistic resources and electronic tools for automatic natural language processing available to researchers in all scientific disciplines, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.

CLARIN meets the challenges and research perspectives in the field of e-Science, especially the so-called e-Humanities. E-Science as a new methodological trend assumes wide application of technologies supporting the user with employing large collections of texts in their research. The number of documents available online and in other electronic forms (press articles, digital archives, advertising texts, blogs, etc.) is growing exponentially. The dynamic growth of digital text material is a valuable source of research, but it also creates a number of challenges for scientists. Commercial search engines do not provide enough help to people looking for specialized information related to a specific field, person, event or time frame. Finding interesting news or compiling lists of hundreds or even thousands of objects is beyond the capacity of individual researchers and is time-consuming. On the other hand, the need to radically reduce the number of source materials may have a negative impact on the obtained research results.

Researchers who recognise the need to study large collections of texts can benefit significantly from information linguistics, natural language engineering, language technology, and speech technology. There are many interesting solutions and offers that have a significant advantage over traditional methods. CLARIN’s objective is to facilitate access to the developed language tools and resources and to support the use of language technologies in the humanities and social sciences.

CLARIN MISSION

The CLARIN network services are available under open licenses to researchers from countries forming the CLARIN ERIC consortium. The services are particularly geared towards researchers in the humanities and social sciences and all those who work with written documents and speech in any European language. CLARIN provides researchers with universal tools for natural language analysis and an open-access archive of linguistic resources and source materials.

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The CLARIN infrastructure serves as a basis for the development of web applications. They enable an in-depth, automatic analysis of the text structure and speech archives, and – to some extent – they touch upon the meaning of documents and recordings in natural language.

The initiative to build CLARIN ERIC was born in 2005 from the awareness of the existence of barriers preventing the widespread use of the achievements of natural language engineering in scientific research.
1. Coherence of language technologies. As a result of the dynamic development of language technologies, a great number of standards and data formats have been created. It is necessary to make the resulting programs and resources interoperable so that they can be easily used and freely combined.
2. Technical and substantive availability. Language technology scientists usually work in a closed environment with a hermetic language, and the application of individual programs can be a challenge even for a computer scientist. Thanks to CLARIN, the necessity of such technological expertise is no longer required.
3. Level of support for European languages. The privileged position of the English language means that a great deal of research is conducted on texts in this language. It is necessary to expand the available technology to at least the minimum usable level, which will allow the use of language technology also for other natural languages.
The CLARIN initiative is widely supported by the scientific community: over 100 European research units have already joined in. Consequently, there is high potential that these barriers will be overcome in the not-so-distant future.

Official mission statement (PDF)

Structure

CLARIN ERIC Management Board and National Consortia

CLARIN’s governing body at European level is a consortium of countries called CLARIN ERIC, made up of national governments and intergovernmental organizations. The main objective of CLARIN ERIC is to build, coordinate and manage the CLARIN infrastructure.

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Individual member countries create national consortia, which include universities, libraries, public archives and other research institutions, providing access to digital linguistic data collections and tools for their analysis. CLARIN members make their own decisions about their contribution to infrastructure development. However, they are obliged to implement the adopted standards that guarantee:
- interoperability of tools and resources available under CLARIN infrastructure;
- accessibility resulting from the public availability of services;
- sustainability (CLARIN is an infrastructure, not a limited time project).

CLARIN Centres – knowledge nodes

The basic units that make up the CLARIN structure are centres that provide a clearly defined scope of services:

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- Type B Centre – this type of institution is a basic infrastructure node maintaining language processing services, computing equipment and data repositories integrated with the European CLARIN infrastructure;
- Type C Centre – this type of institution collaborates with the infrastructure by sharing and providing certain resource descriptions – types of metadata;
- Type K Centre – this type of institution is known as Knowledge Sharing Centre and is responsible for promoting knowledge about the activities of the infrastructure; for forming a network of specialist teams supporting specific research projects; type K Centres are places where users can report a problem with the operation of the infrastructure, receive professional help as well as make enquiries regarding the use of the infrastructure.
Type B centers are the basic elements of the network. Polish CLARIN node – Language Technology Centre CL-PL (LTC) – is being built at Wrocław University of Technology. Thanks to the strict observance of accepted standards, users registered in the LTC will be granted free access to tools and language resources available both in Poland and in CLARIN centres in other member countries.

The aim of the Language Technology Centre CL-PL is filling gaps in the system of Polish basic tools and resources. We actively cooperate with scientists in the fields of humanities and social sciences in order to create and develop innovative, e-humanities-oriented applications for the Polish language. Ultimately, cooperation may also include digital libraries, archives, museums, etc.

The Language Technology Centre at the Wrocław University of Technology has the status of type B and type K centres. This means that there is a technical infrastructure here that ensures the operation of text processing services and a team of specialists who provide assistance to users.

The structure of the Polish node – CLARIN-PL

In Poland, the unit responsible for the implementation of the goals set for CLARIN ERIC is the CLARIN-PL Language Technology Centre (type B and K Centres) located at the Wrocław University of Technology. The most important function of the Centre is to maintain and make available IT tools (software), data resources and machines equipped with appropriate computing power. The above elements constitute the basic infrastructure necessary for language processing; these components are delivered and developed by the CLARIN-PL Consortium associating six scientific units: the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Łódź, the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Wrocław, the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology and the Wrocław University of Technology – the project leader.

What is the European Research Infrastructure?

Financing

The CLARIN project was launched thanks to the financial support of the European Commission and is now fully funded by the member countries. In the case of Poland, the Ministry of Education and Science is the administrative body financing the activities of the CLARIN-PL Language Technology Centre.

The use of the CLARIN infrastructure is free of charge for research and teaching purposes.

Collaboration

We attempt to make the use of our tools and applications as simple and intuitive as possible. To make it easier, we organize training sessions, workshops, and provide individual consultations – if you need any of these, please contact us (link). We also try to develop documentation containing instructions, tutorials and descriptions of illustrative infrastructure use. However, we are aware that our offer does not always meet the requirements of researchers – in such a case, do not hesitate to contact us. You are also more than welcome to contact us if you have an idea on how to extend existing functions.

The basic pillar of our development strategy is contact with the user – we try to monitor the use of the infrastructure and diagnose the needs that have not been noticed thus far. These observations and suggestions allow us to choose the best direction of service development.