The Common European Language Data Space (LDS) is an integral part of the EU data strategy, which aims at developing a single market for data. Its decentralised technical infrastructure and governance scheme are currently being developed by the LDS project, which also has dedicated tasks for proof-of-concept prototypes, handling legal aspects, raising awareness and promoting the LDS through events and social media channels. The LDS is part of a broader vision for establishing all necessary components to develop European large language models.

This article highlights ELRA’s latest achievements in the field of Language Resources (LRs) identification, sharing and production. It also reports on ELRA’s involvement in several national and international projects, as well as in the organization of events for the support of LRs and related Language Technologies, including for under-resourced languages. Over the past few years, ELRA, together with its operational agency ELDA, has continued to increase its catalogue offer of LRs, establishing worldwide partnerships for the production of various types of LRs (SMS, tweets, crawled data, MT aligned data, speech LRs, sentiment-based data, etc.). Through their consistent involvement in EU-funded projects, ELRA and ELDA have contributed to improve the access to multilingual information in the context of the pandemic, develop tools for the de-identification of texts in the legal and medical domains, support the EU eTranslation Machine Translation system, and set up a European platform providing access to both resources and services. In December 2019, ELRA co-organized the LT4All conference, whose main topics were Language Technologies for enabling linguistic diversity and multilingualism worldwide. Moreover, although LREC was cancelled in 2020, ELRA published the LREC 2020 proceedings for the Main conference and Workshops papers, and carried on its dissemination activities while targeting the new LREC edition for 2022.

After celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2015, ELRA is carrying on its strong involvement in the HLT field. To share ELRA’s expertise of those 21 past years, this article begins with a presentation of ELRA’s strategic Data and LR Management Plan for a wide use by the language communities. Then, we further report on ELRA’s activities and services provided since LREC 2014. When looking at the cataloguing and licensing activities, we can see that ELRA has been active at making the Meta-Share repository move toward new developments steps, supporting Europe to obtain accurate LRs within the Connecting Europe Facility programme, promoting the use of LR citation, creating the ELRA License Wizard web portal. The article further elaborates on the recent LR production activities of various written, speech and video resources, commissioned by public and private customers. In parallel, ELDA has also worked on several EU-funded projects centred on strategic issues related to the European Digital Single Market. The last part gives an overview of the latest dissemination activities, with a special focus on the celebration of its 20th anniversary organised in Dubrovnik (Croatia) and the following up of LREC, as well as the launching of the new ELRA portal.

This paper emphasises on ELRA’s contribution to the HLT field thanks to the consolidation of its services since LREC 2012. Among the most recent contributions is the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), with the creation and exploitation of an associated web portal to enable the procurement of unique identifiers for Language Resources. Interoperability, consolidation and synchronization remain also a strong focus in ELRA’s cataloguing work, in particular with ELRA’s involvement in the META-SHARE project, whose platform is to become ELRA’s next instrument of sharing LRs. Since last LREC, ELRA has continued its action to offer free LRs to the research community. Cooperation is another watchword within ELRA’s activities on multiple aspects: 1) at the legal level, ELRA is supporting the EC in identifying the gaps to be fulfilled to reach harmonized copyright regulations for the HLT community in Europe; 2) at the production level, ELRA is participating in several international projects, in the field of LR production and evaluation of technologies; 3) at the communication level, ELRA has organised the NLP12 meeting with the aim of boosting co-operation and strengthening the bridges between various communities.

This paper aims at giving an overview of ELRA’s recent activities. The first part elaborates on ELRA’s means of boosting the sharing Language Resources (LRs) within the HLT community through its catalogues, LRE-Map initiative, as well as its work towards the integration of its LRs within the META-SHARE open infrastructure. The second part shows how ELRA helps in the development and evaluation of HLT, in particular through its numerous participations to collaborative projects for the production of resources and platforms to facilitate their production and exploitation. A third part focuses on ELRA’s work for clearing IPR issues in a HLT-oriented context, one of its latest initiative being its involvement in a Fair Research Act proposal to promote the easy access to LRs to the widest community. Finally, the last part elaborates on recent actions for disseminating information and promoting cooperation in the field, e.g. an the Language Library being launched at LREC2012 and the creation of an International Standard LR Number, a LR unique identifier to enable the accurate identification of LRs. Among the other messages ELRA will be conveying the attendees are the announcement of a set of freely available resources, the establishment of a LR and Evaluation forum, etc.

This paper describes the latest developments in ELRA’s services within the field of Language Resources (LR). These developments focus on 4 main groups of activities: the identification and distribution of Language Resources; the production of LRs; the evaluation of Human Language Technology (HLT), and the dissemination of information in the field. ELRA’s initial work on the distribution of language resources has evolved throughout the years, currently covering a much wider range of activities that have been considered crucial for the current needs of the R&D community and the “good health” of the LR world. Regarding distribution, considerable work has been done on a broader identification, which does not only consider resources to be immediately negotiated for distribution but which aims to inform on all available resources. This has been the seed for the Universal Catalogue. Furthermore, a Catalogue of LRs with favourable conditions for R&D has also been created. Moreover, the different activities in what regards identification on demand, production within different frameworks, evaluation of language technologies and participation in evaluation campaigns, as well as our very specific focus on information dissemination are described in detail in this paper.