European Language Resources Association (ELRA)

The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit organisation founded in 1995 and legally established in Luxembourg. Its core mission is to make Language Resources (LRs) for Human Language Technologies (HLT) available to the research and industry community at large, acting as a central broker between producers and users of such resources.

ELRA carries out activities spanning identification and distribution, production and validation, technology evaluation, and information dissemination in HLT. Much of this operational work — including resource distribution and evaluation campaigns — is executed through its dedicated agency, ELDA (Evaluations and Language Resources Distribution Agency). ELRA also conducts market studies and publishes a quarterly newsletter for the HLT community.

The association maintains a catalogue of more than 1,100 language resources spanning numerous languages and modalities, serving R&D labs, companies, and development organisations for training and evaluating language technology systems. ELRA also led the creation of the ISLRN (International Standard Language Resource Number) system, endorsed by the NLP community in 2013, and holds A-level liaison status with ISO.

Every two years, ELRA organises the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), which since its inaugural edition in Granada in 1998 has become the major international event in the field. ELRA's roughly 50 institutional members worldwide make innovations in language resource management, standardisation, and NLP evaluation directly relevant to its work.