CLARIN & Responses to COVID-19

On this page you can find information on CLARIN work and collaborations in the context of COVID-19 related research in the social and political sciences domain.

Initiatives and Support by CLARIN

CLARIN-Funded Project: ParlaMint

CLARIN is currently funding the project ParlaMint: Towards Comparable Parliamentary Corpora. This project aims to provide multilingual standardised and linguistically processed resources for focused observations on trends, opinions, decisions with respect to lockdowns and restrictive measures in times of emergencies. For this goal, two types of parliamentary corpora are envisaged: a contemporary one that is focused on COVID-19 issues (November 2019 - July 2020) and a reference one for comparison (January 2015 - October 2019). The data will be made available through concordances and monitoring tools. Read more

Series of CLARIN Cafés

The CLARIN Café is an informal and interactive space for discussion where researchers, lecturers, students and experts can meet to share experiences and insights that have a potential relevance for the activities and developments within the context of the CLARIN universe. Read more about planned and past Cafés

CLARIN Support for Virtual Events

Since the COVID-19 dynamics are preventing the CLARIN community from conducting face-to-face activities, we warmly invite proposals for the organisation of virtual events and other creative formats that could contribute to the continued outreach to communities of use. Information on how CLARIN can support the organisation of virtual events and on the application procedure can be found on the virtual events support page.

Overviews by Other Organisations of COVID-19 Related Initiatives

Highlights of the Initiatives within ERIC Forum

Forum created an overview of the ERICs that have set up or are currently planning initiatives in response to the Coronavirus outbreak. Read more

ESFRI Overview of Relevant Activities

is aggregating information about dedicated services offered by Research Infrastructures and communicating all relevant actions as broadly as possible. Read more

RDA COVID-19 Social Science Working Group

The Research Data Alliance ( ) recently set up a new subgroup of the RDA COVID-19 working group, specifically focused on social science. The aim of the subgroup is to define detailed practical guidelines on data sharing in the present COVID-19 circumstances to help stakeholders follow best practices in order to maximise the efficiency and impact of their work. Read more

Examples of Text Collections and Available Language Resources

Swedish COVID-19 Corpus (sv-COVID-19)

Språkbanken (SWE-CLARIN) has put together a corpus of about 4000 articles (and growing) from the time when the first media articles about the new virus started to appear in the Swedish media landscape, i.e. from January 2020 to the beginning of January 2021 and beyond. The data comes from various Swedish sites, and the collection is not static, as the aim is to enhance and enrich the corpus with regular updates as well as with Twitter and Blog data. The first 2500 articles are already available from the SpråkbankenText’s corpus search interface Korp (version-1, updated Feb., 2021) and further additions to the corpus will be available in the next Korp releases. Read more

Survey on Living and Working in Times of Corona

WageIndicator, partnering with CLARIN ERIC in the context of the SSHOC project, is surveying and interviewing people around the globe (over 120 countries are involved) to discover the effect of COVID-19 on our jobs, lives and mood. Read more

COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Allen Institute for AI has partnered with leading research groups to prepare and distribute the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a free resource of over 51,000 scholarly articles, including over 40,000 with full text about COVID-19 and the Coronavirus family of viruses for use by the global research community. Read more

Coronavirus Corpus from English Corpora

The Coronavirus Corpus is designed to be a comprehensive record of the social, cultural, and economic impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) in 2020 and beyond, and it is part of the English-Corpora.org suite of corpora, which offer insight into genre-based, historical, and dialectal variation in English. Early May 2020 the corpus was about 270 million words in size, and it continues to grow by 3-4 million words each day. Read more

Social Media for Public Health

Social Media for Public Health collects links to resources for academics and other investigators, including datasets pertinent to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more

Examples of NLP Tools and Compute Capacity Availability for the Study of COVID-19 Related Phenomena

Cloud Support to COVID-19 Research: UFAL COVIDcloud

The CLARIN centre LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ created the UFAL COVIDcloud, a Linux based cluster providing approximately 1000 CPU cores to support researchers working on a solution of the COVID-19 crisis. Read more

ELRC Collection and Coordination of Relevant Language Resources and Tools Across Europe

The European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) initiative will collect multilingual resources that are of relevance to potential COVID-19 pandemic research activities from the perspective of SSH. The resources will be made available to all under the most permissive license for non-commercial research. Read more

Sketch Engine

On the Sketch Engine website a set of tools is available to work with the open COVID-19 corpus also referred to as CORD-19. Read more

Evaluation of Tools and Systems Processing COVID-19 Related Data

Community Evaluation Effort for MultiLingual Information Access on COVID-19 (Ongoing)

During an international crisis, the fast and accurate exchange of information across languages is essential. The COVID-19 Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) initiative is a collective effort from the LT community to improve information exchange about the virus, across all EU languages and beyond, by supporting the development of applications and services in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval organizes a community evaluation effort aimed at accelerating the creation of resources and tools for improved MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) in the current emergency situation with a reference to a general public use case. Read more

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval offers the following task:

The first of the three planned evaluation rounds of the Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval initiative has been concluded and the final meeting took place on 12-14 January 2021.
The outcomes and results of the first evaluation round are now available:

The datasets for round 2 will is prepared in the course of January-February 2021, and all MLIA tasks will be open for participation and submission as of March-April 2021. The results will be reviewed and analysed during the second evaluation round in late May - early June 2021.

Hackathon on COVID-19 Related Disinformation (Past Virtual Event)

CLARIN organised a hackathon on COVID-19 related disinformation in the period between 21 September and 15 October 2020 with the goal of bringing together cross-disciplinary groups of researchers to work on the task of disinformation detection in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were invited to use existing data sets containing disinformation and fake news in order to create algorithmic solutions to research questions of their choice, e.g. by assigning the likelihood for a text to be disinformation or automatically detecting re-postings of known conspiracy theories even if they are rephrased. Analytical and comparative contributions were also welcome. Read more

Highlights of Relevant Events and Publications, Calls for Papers

1st Workshop on NLP COVID-19 Workshop (Part 1) @ACL2020: Event page, Proceedings
1st Workshop onNLP COVID-19 Workshop (Part 2) @ EMNLP2020: Event page, Proceedings
COVID-19 Special Issue in IJCL (deadline passed): Link to publication is to be added
Selected Papers from the CLARIN Annual Conference 2020: Link to publication is to be added