Blog post written by Darja Fišer and Jakob Lenardič
The Czech consortium LINDAT is a founding member of CLARIN . It is a B-certified centre that involves four Czech research institutions – the Department of Cybernetics at the University of West Bohemia, the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at Charles University, the Czech Language Institute at the Czech Academy of Science, and the NLP Centre at Masaryk University. The consortium is led by Professor Eva Hajičová.
The consortium offers a pioneering repository for language resources, whose architecture serves as the backbone of several other CLARIN repositories. The repository rigorously follows best practices on metadata presentation, so it is ensured that all language data are safely stored with clear documentation as well as outfitted with guidelines on proper citation. Many of the monolingual, parallel and speech corpora within the repository can be accessed through the concordancer KonText, which is a flexible search environment that allows users to perform queries of various complexities – from simple searches by lemma or word form to using CQL – as well as save search results for future research.
LINDAT also offers an integrated environment for storing, building, searching and visualizing treebanks, which are databases of syntactically annotated sentences. As a pivotal tool for treebanks, LINDAT offers PLM Tree Query, through which researchers can browse a great variety of treebanks in 61 languages. For the novice researcher, the Tree Query is accompanied by a step-by-step tutorial that shows how to execute searches in the query language. Together with the Norwegian INESS, LINDAT is a CLARIN Knowledge Centre that specializes in the creation and maintenance of treebanks.
LINDAT actively works on introducing its state-of-the-art language technologies to researchers both within computational fields like and also within the Digital Humanities and Social Science. To this end, LINDAT is organizing a User Involvement workshop on 24 April 2018 in Prague, which aims to showcase how technological infrastructures are also relevant beyond the computational framework.
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