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Photo: ERCC team |
A guest blog post written by Alexander König (Eurac Research, Bolzano) about the recently joined CLARIN Centre: Eurac Research CLARIN Centre (ERCC).
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The Eurac Research CLARIN Centre (ERCC) has recently joined the ever growing number of CLARIN centres. It is the second centre within CLARIN-IT. The particularity of the ERCC is a strong regional focus, whereas the ILC4CLARIN in Pisa takes on a more general role as the national coordinator of CLARIN-IT.
ERCC is run by the Institute for Applied Linguistics of Eurac Research, situated in Bolzano, South Tyrol, right in the heart of the Dolomites. Thanks to this location, the group has a strong research focus on the local multilingualism. In South Tyrol not only Italian and German, but also the smaller Ladin language are all recognized as official languages of the province, interact with each other in a lot of interesting ways, and create particular demands like multilingual legal and administrative terminology. approaches to teaching in multilingual environments, etc.
The Institute for Applied Linguistics is tackling several of these challenges by means of three research groups: Terminology, Bi- and Multilingualism and Language Technologies. This latter group with a focus on computational linguistics and corpus linguistics has been following CLARIN for a long time, also regularly attending the annual conferences. Therefore being now officially recognized as a part of the CLARIN family is the result of many years of hard work.
The ERCC has set up a repository based on the popular CLARIN DSpace software which has been developed by the team at Charles University in Prague. The developers at ERCC have adapted this software by creating a number of Docker images from it that are now running on a Kubernetes cluster hosted at Eurac Research. We will be happily sharing these adaptations with other CLARIN centres who are interested in running a Dockerized version of CLARIN DSpace.
Now that the software is up and running the ERCC team will take the coming months to deposit all its various Italian and German language corpora into the system and thus make them available via the CLARIN infrastructure. Another plan for the near future is to set up an endpoint for the Federated Content Search and the next big milestone will be to undergo assessment as a B Centre.
We will be pleased to receive your feedback and also are in the process of setting up our own blog to continue to report on future developments.