[open-linguistics] FYI: ELRA free language resources

[Christian Chiarcos]

Of course, "freedom" is somewhat limited here:
- free as in "free beer" (Exhibit C)
- attribution (15)
- free use is restricted to "language engineering research activities" (3)
- modification and rearrangement permitted (4), also development and  
rework as part of "internal language engineering research activities" (5)
- no redistribution of neither the resources nor any derivative product or  
service (6)
- no republication, in particular not under an open source license (7)

Such restrictions are regrettable, because they render these resources  
unsuitable for many potential applications (say, their inclusion in the  
LLOD cloud ;). Still, it is a step in the right direction for an  
institution like the ELRA. In the end, this is a response to requests to  
make some of their resources available under less restrictive conditions,  
and if the community stays persistent, we may eventually convince them to  
broaden the conditions for selected resources even further -- if a  
business model can be developed that secures the financial future of ELRA  
independently from license fees.

Best,
Christian

On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 13:38:56 -0700, Christian Chiarcos  
<christian.chiarcos at web.de> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> at LREC this year, the ELRA announced a number of freely available  
> language resources. Aside from speech recognition data (which is  
> probably not that relevant to the group), it includes also
> - lexicons (MULTEXT: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish),
> - multi-lingual and parallel corpora (CRATER/CRATER2, MLCC: English,  
> French, Spanish; Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish), and
> - the TUNA corpus of referring expressions (English)
>
> The link is http://www.elra.info/Free-LRs.html.
>
> Enjoy,
> Christian