European Language Resource Coordination: Collecting Language Resources for Public Sector Multilingual Information Management

In order to help improve the quality, coverage and performance of automated translation solutions for current and future Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) digital services, the European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) consortium was set up through a service contract operating under the European Commission’s CEF SMART 2014/1074 programme to initiate a number of actions to support the collection of Language Resources (LRs) within the public sector in EU member and CEF-affiliated countries. The first action focused on raising awareness in the public sector through the organisation of dedicated events: 2 international conferences and 29 country-specific workshops to engage national as well as regional/municipal governmental organisations, language competence centres, relevant European institutions and other potential holders of LRs from public service administrations and NGOs. In order to gather resources shared by the contributors, the ELRC-SHARE Repository was set up together with services supporting the sharing of LRs, such as the ELRC Helpdesk and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) clearance support. All collected LRs pass a validation process developed by ELRC. The collected LRs cover all official EU languages, plus Icelandic and Norwegian.