CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is an ESFRI initiative which aims to create an eResearch infrastructure that makes language resources (annotated audio and video recordings, text collections and corpora, lexical resources, ontologies, etc.) and tools based on language resources and language technology (speech recognizers, lemmatizers, parsers, summarizers, information extraction and text mining systems, etc.) available and readily usable to scholars of all disciplines, in particular the humanities and social sciences.
Language technology is the common name for a spectrum of technologies, tools, algorithms, etc., which enable computers to deal with human language in all its manifestations – speech, writing and (to a limited extent) sign. As such, LT is a kind of information and communication technology (ICT), and a strongly interdisciplinary field.
CLARIN was established as an ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) in February 2012 with nine founding members (eight EU member states, and an intergovernmental organization). Since then more countries have joined or are on their way towards a membership application. In 2013, Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish Research Council) approved a proposal for Swedish membership in CLARIN, including a Swedish national CLARIN organization. Through Swe-Clarin, Sweden joined the CLARIN ERIC during 2014.
The current members of Swe-Clarin are the following institutions:
- Språkbanken / Department of Swedish / University of Gothenburg (Type B – service-providing center, national CLARIN coordinator)
- Swedish National Data Service (SND) / University of Gothenburg (Type A – Infrastructure center)
- National Archives (Type K – Knowledge Center)
- The Speech Group / Department of Speech, Music and Hearing / KTH (Type K – Knowledge Center)
- Language Council of Sweden / Institute for Language and Folklore (Type K – Knowledge Center)
- CILTLab / Linköping University (Type K – Knowledge Center)
- The Humanities Laboratory / Lund University (Type K – Knowledge Center)
- Computational Linguistics and Sign Language / Department of Linguistics / Stockholm University (Type K – Knowledge Center)
- Computational Linguistics / Deparment of Linguistics and Philology / Uppsala University (Type K – Knowledge Center)