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RESULTS FROM THE LANGUAGE BANK USER SURVEY
FIN-CLARIN and the Language Bank of Finland collected information about the users’ wishes and opinions with a survey during November-December 2011. You can read about the main results (in Finnish) at https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/FinCLARIN/KielipankkiKayttajakysely2011.
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FINLAND AND CLARIN ERIC
CLARIN ERIC (ERIC = European Research Infrastructure Consortium) is a new European organ that was founded in order to ensure a permanent continuation to CLARIN. The main objective of CLARIN ERIC is to build and maintain the common infrastructure for language research in Europe. Finland will participate in CLARIN ERIC as an observer until the national consortium has been formed. The negotiations for the consortium are currently underway.
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ASK QUESTIONS AND TALK TO OTHER RESEARCHERS IN THE LANGUAGE BANK DISCUSSION FORUM
The Language Bank of Finland has a new discussion forum. You can access it by logging in to the Scientist’s User Interface with your Haka username and password (https://sui.csc.fi). After logging in, you can find the image for the forum on the SUI desktop and double-click on it. Ask questions, talk to other researchers or share tips on language materials, linguistic research methods or Language Bank services! You can write messages in English or Finnish and you can also subscribe to message threads.
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NEW TOOLS: LAT, ANNEX AND TROVA
The LAT system developed by MPI (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) in the Netherlands has been installed on the server of the Language Bank of Finland and it is now in test use. Using LAT tools, it is possible to browse, view and listen to speech and language corpora that include annotated audio and video material. You can login to LAT using your Haka account. The test phase and the instructions for use are still in progress. However, there are some initial instructions available in Finnish at https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/FinCLARIN/KielipankkiOhjeetLAT. The first complete speech corpora will be opened in LAT during early 2012.
More information about LAT tools and features: http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/annex
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CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING LANGUAGE RESOURCES
In January 2012, a new version of the Finnish corpus Suomen kielen näytteitä (SKN) by Kotus will be opened in the LAT platform. The sentences in the original ”dialect books” have been aligned with the corresponding parts in the sound files. These annotations can be used in order to search the corpus with Trova. SKN contains approximately 100 hours of speech from the different dialectal regions in Finland. More information about SKN:http://www.kotus.fi/index.phtml?s=3913
The negotiations with Kopiosto about the use of a large newspaper and journal material covering the years 1790-1910 will soon be completed. The material will contain almost one billion words. It is intended that this corpus will be made available through a concordance tool in the Language Bank of Finland in 2012.
Other significant speech and text corpora are also forthcoming in the near future. You will be learning more about them in the following newsletters.
Current collections of the Language Bank of Finland: https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/FinCLARIN/KielipankkiKoti
Forthcoming language resources: https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/Trash/FinCLARINFinClarinHallintoUudetKielivarat
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SUGGEST NEW MATERIAL FOR THE LANGUAGE BANK
You may now inform us about a new language resource using a handy e-form: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/32074/lomake.html (The form is currently in Finnish only, but English and Swedish versions will appear later.)
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Merry Christmas and Prosperous New Year 2012!
Mietta Lennes
Project Planner / FIN-CLARIN
finclarin@helsinki.fi
