We are very pleased to announce that on 1 March 2018 Croatia officially became a member of CLARIN ERIC, bringing the total number of full members up to twenty.
Croatia participated as an active consortium member in the preparatory phase FP7 project CLARIN, and now in 2018 the Republic of Croatia has decided to officially join CLARIN as a full member. The HR‑CLARIN Consortium consists of two faculties from the University of Zagreb, University of Zagreb Computing Centre, two public research institutes, the National and University Library, the Library of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and the Arts and Croatian Language Technologies Society. All these institutions already participated in numerous national and EU funded projects in the fields of corpus and computational linguistics, language technologies, digital humanities and social sciences in the last 10-15 years.
The HR-CLARIN consortium is committed to further develop the existing Croatian language resources and tools in accordance with the CLARIN specifications and incorporate them into the CLARIN infrastructure. “We hope that the CLARIN ERIC best practices will provide a valuable role model for planned development. In return, it will provide elaborated sets of Croatian language resources and tools to the CLARIN ERIC community and valuable datasets compiled in several large topic‑oriented digitalization campaigns” says Professor Marko Tadić of the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences who has been appointed as the National Coordinator for Croatia.
The HR-CLARIN consortium priorities are:
- making Croatian language resources and tools accessible and interoperable within CLARIN-ERIC community;
- establishing a HR-CLARIN B-Centre in the medium-term future;
- establishing a HR-CLARIN K-Centre in the long-term future;
- taking part in CLARIN ERIC projects and activities;
- raising awareness about CLARIN ERIC to the researchers in the (digital) humanities and social sciences at (inter)national level.
As the Croatian language became the 24th official language of the EU in 2013, the HR-CLARIN consortium is highly motivated to provide language resources, tools and services that will help researchers and other interested stakeholders to process texts in Croatian in notably easier manner than before.
Members of the HR-CLARIN consortium:
- University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
- University of Zagreb Computing Centre (SRCE)
- University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing
- Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics
- Old Church Slavonic Institute
- National and University Library in Zagreb
- Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Library
- Croatian Language Technologies Society
Photo: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb