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Frequently Asked Questions

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  1. How can I become an ELRA member?
  2. Who can join ELRA and what are the membership fees?
  3. Why join ELRA? What are the advantages offered to ELRA members?
  4. What is the membership fidelity programme?
  5. What is ELDA?
  6. How do I order from the catalogue?
  7. What if I don't find the resource I need in the catalogue?
  8. Can you clarify the various prices in the catalogue?
  9. Are ELRA Language Resources expensive?
  10. What are the user licenses?
  11. Can you explain the difference between the various catalogues?


1. How can I become an ELRA member?

Please fill in the online ELRA Membership Form and return it to us.


2. Who can join ELRA and what are the membership fees?

ELRA membership is open to:

  • any organisation, public or private, European or non-European. However, full membership, with voting rights, is available only to organisations legally established in Europe (for details, see Statutes: Article 5.2).The annual membership fees depend on the type of organisation.

 

  • any individual with an interest in the field of Information Technology, and/or of Linguistics can become an individual member. Individual membership is acquired by paying the membership fees for a two-year period, either as part of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) fees, or by joining directly at any time (for details, see Statutes: Article 5.3).

 

Please see the Membership Fees Page.

Please note that the membership year runs from 1 January to 31 December.


3. Why join ELRA? What are the advantages offered to ELRA members?

The Members' Benefits Page lists the services that are offered to both the organizations that join ELRA as institutional members and individual members.


4. What is the Membership Fidelity Programme?

The previous membership fidelity has been discontinued and officially closed on May 1st 2018.

A new membership schema has been set up in order to both reward faithful institutional members and serve as an incentive for them to remain members over the years. The individual members do not benefit from discount on the fees.

The new 3-year schema is available in the Rewarding our faithful institutional members section.

5. What is ELDA?

ELDA, the Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency, was created in parallel to ELRA, European Language Resources Association, in February 1995. Incorporated as a company in order to handle all the commercial and business-oriented tasks of the association, ELDA is ELRA’s operational body, and is in charge of the development and the implementation of ELRA’s missions and tasks as defined by the board of the association. For a more comprehensive description of the main activities run at ELDA, please refer to corresponding section on the web site.

6. How do I order from the catalogue?

To place your order, please return by fax the order form available on-line (pdf | doc | rtf ) duly completed and signed at the following fax number : +33 1 43 13 33 30 (as well as the ELRA membership form – see section below – if you wish to benefit from the member price) To speed up the delivery, 1 copy may be faxed to +33 1 43 13 33 30, and the 2 original signed copies must be sent to ELDA by regular mail.

7. What if I don't find the resource I need in the catalogue?

As an ELRA member, you can benefit from both ELRA services of Resources Identification and Production.

  1. If the resource you are looking for is not in the ELRA catalogue, you are invited to browse the Universal Catalogue (this catalogue can be accessed from the Members' only Section.) to get an early access to all Language Resources identified by ELRA. In addition, the association will provide you with legal assistance in the negotiation of the contract with the resource provider or will undertake this negotiation in order to include the resource in the ELRA Catalogue.
  2. You may contact ELRA to produce new Language Resources to help you build, improve or evaluate natural language and speech algorithms or systems. Those Language Resources may be also used as core resources for the software localisation and language services industries, language studies, electronic publishing, international transactions, subject-area specialists and end users. Language Resources in more than 25 languages have been compiled.


8. Can you clarify the various prices in the catalogue?

Prices in the catalogue depend on the ELRA membership and are defined as follows:

  Definition Abbreviation in catalogue
Membership Members, as well as non-members, of ELRA are allowed to purchase resources. Members are entitled to get a discount on public price. - Member- Non Member
Type of organisation Language Resources are open to any organisation, whether public or private. - Academic- Commercial



9. Are ELRA Language Resources expensive?

Mostly all Language Resources of the catalogue are available both for R&D and commercial purposes. A substantial discount is offered for R&D work. Consequently, over 200 Language Resources are provided at 500 EURO and below, and some of them are available for free except shipment. Those resources are available in the R&D Catalogue and are available at very affordable prices. As an encouragement, ELRA members are offered extra discounts with respect to the public price. Of course, the price of each Language Resource in the catalogue depends very much on the type of resource (from a few hundred lexical entries to large speech databases), the type of customer (ELRA member/non member) and the type of use made out of the resource (research/internal use or commercial use).

10. What are the user licenses?

  Definition Abbreviation in catalogue
License There are 3 types of user licenses:- Research use- Commercial use- Evaluation use (3 month period) - Research- Commercial- Evaluation



11. Can you explain the difference between the various catalogues?

ELRA maintains 3 catalogues which are the following:

  • ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources The Catalogue of Language Resources contains 4 groups of LRs: Speech, Multimodal/Multimedia, Written Lexica/Corpora and Terminology. The LRs are sold on a pay-per-resource basis and detailed information can found both on ELRA and ELDA web sites. The resources can be ordered from ELDA, by members as well as non-members. The Catalogue of Languages Resources can be accessed from catalog.elra.info
  • R&D Catalogue The R&D Catalogue is a subset of the Catalogue of Language Resources dedicated to academic research, the R&D Catalogue. It is a brand new service that ELRA is offering to both member and non-member customers. This catalogue provides a list of Language Resources more specifically produced for R&D purposes in Human Language Technology, available at very affordable prices, and dedicated to a research use. Interface and browsing tools are the same as those used in ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources. The R&D Catalogue can be accessed from catalog.elra.info/retd
  • Universal Catalogue The Universal Catalogue is an ELRA service reserved to ELRA members. It comprises information regarding Language Resources identified by the ELRA team. It aims to be a repository for all identified Language Resources so as to provide its Members with information on what resources there exist and what their characteristics are. It should function as a pointer to interesting resources for members, a search help that would allow users to have an initial insight on a resource and to enquire further about it. It is permanently under enlargement and new information is being added constantly. The Universal Catalogue can be accessed from Members' only Section (www.elra.info). Entering the userid and password is required.