CLARIN’s Key Resource Families

Abstract

CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure that has been established to support the accessibility of language resources and technologies to researchers from the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. This paper presents CLARIN’s Key Resource Families, a new initiative within the infrastructure, the goal of which is to collect and present in a uniform way the most prominent data types in the network of CLARIN consortia that display a high degree of maturity, are available for most EU languages, are a rich source of social and cultural data, and as such are highly relevant for research from a wide range of disciplines and methodological approaches in the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences as well as for cross-disciplinary and trans-national comparative research. The four resource families that we present each in turn are newspaper, parliamentary, CMC (computer-mediated communication), and parallel corpora. We focus on their presentation within the infrastructure, their metadata in terms of size, temporal coverage, annotation, accessibility and license, and discuss current problems.