Recent Developments within the European Language Resources Association (ELRA)

The main achievement of ELRA (the most visible) is the growth of its catalogue. The ELRA catalogue as of April 2000 lists 111 speech resources, 50 monolingual lexica, 113 multilingual lexica, 24 written corpora and 275 terminological databases. However, many Language Resources (LRs) need to be identified and/or produced. To this effect, ELRA is active in promoting and funding the co-production of new LRs through several calls for proposals. As for the validity of the existence of ELRA for the distribution of language resources, the statistics from the past two years speak for themselves. The 1999 fiscal report showed a rise with the sale of 217 LRs (122 for research and 95 for commercial purposes; with speech databases representing nearly 45%), compared to the sale of 180 LRs (90 for research and 90 for commercial purposes; with speech databases representing nearly 65%), in 1998 and to 33 sold in 1997. The other visible action of ELRA is its membership drive: since its foundation, ELRA has attracted an increasing number of members (from 63 in 1995 to 95 in 1999). This article is updated from a paper presented at Eurospeech'99.