Swe-Clarin

CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is an ESFRI initiative which aims to create an e-research infrastructure that makes language resources (annotated audio and video recordings, text collections and corpora, lexical resources, ontologies, etc.) and tools based on language resources and language technology (speech recognizers, lemmatizers, parsers, summarizers, information extraction and text mining systems, etc.) available and readily usable to scholars of all disciplines, in particular the humanities and social sciences (HSS).

Swe-Clarins takes advantage of the fact that increasing amounts of text and speech material – including historical material – are available in digital form, thus allowing for the utilization of unprecedented volumes of text and speech data in HSS research. The expectation is that this LT-based e-HSS paradigm will lead to completely new kinds of research as well as to new ways of addressing old research questions.

In 2013, the Swedish Research Council approved a proposal for Swedish membership in CLARIN, including a Swedish national CLARIN organization.

Swe-Clarin is organized as a consortium with twelve members. The members are national research environments, archives and libraries, that taken together represents the university community and the societal memory institutions. They provide, among other things, expertise, the development and maintenance of language technology tools, and collections of digital materials.

The organization is coordinated by Språkbanken Text which is one of the CLARIN B-centres, that is, units, often a university or an academic institute, that offer the scientific community access to resources, services and knowledge on a sustainable basis.

Within Swe-Clarin, Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities (GRIDH) , among other things, participates in the distributed K-centre Diachronic Language Resources (CLARIN-DiaRes), that is focused around diachronic text collections, and as a special case of these, historical texts, as well as tools and resources for processing and analysing these.