New developments within the european language resources association (ELRA)

The ELRA catalogue as of April 1999 lists 95 speech resources, 47 monolingual lexica, 105 multilingual lexica, 19 written corpora and more than 275 terminological databases. In the speech area, many databases are available for machine dictation, telephone-based applications, speaker identification and verification applications, as well as several phonetic lexica, for languages such as English, German, Swiss-French, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, etc. 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 1998 fiscal report showed a significant rise with the sale of 179 LRs (86 for research and 93 for commercial purposes; with speech databases representing nearly 70%), compared to 31 sold in 1997.