Description of the RI

HunCLARIN is the research infrastructure network of the most prominent knowledge centres in the field of language and speech technology research and development in Hungary. Its aim is to support research and innovation mainly in the humanities and social sciences with providing LT resources and tools.

At present the HunCLARIN consortium has 9 members (coordinator plus 8 partners), representing the leading centres of Hungarian speech- and language technology research. The coordinator of the infrastructure network is the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, which was one of the founding members of the European CLARIN project, and also played a prominent role in the preparatory phase of CLARIN.

Using the LT resources (eg. mono- or multilingual, as well as domain-specific corpora) and tools (eg. morphological analyzers) developed by the member organizations of HunCLARIN makes content analysis of large corpora, or automatic description of psychological layers of meaning possible.

Outstanding projects like the language-based program for monitoring psychological status of the astronauts of the European Space Agency, or the proofing tools built in the text editors show the high standard of the RIs in HunCLARIN.

The aim of HunCLARIN is to support scientific research by making all digital language resources and tools easily accessible. A prerequisite for this is to create a single sign-on online environment, and its technical background, that makes all the RIs in the group, and in the whole CLARIN network, in different languages easily available and comparable. This would connect Hungarian speech and language technology to the high-level European research and development - as for several European CLARIN members, tools and resources from different centres are already interoperable.

Activities and Services

HunCLARIN Roadshows: HunCLARIN devised the concept of a Roadshow series that is based on the idea of proactively (and literally) bringing language technology to where humanities research is actually done, namely, to Hungarian universities. The other key concept behind the Roadshows is that instead of a one-sided evangelisation of language technology, the workshop should mobilise and showcase local initiatives (workshops so far: Szeged, Debrecen, Pécs).

Web-service of key Hungarian resources and tools: e-magyar (e-Hungarian). The toolchain was developed in 2016. The rationale for it was based on a clear vision of an open, modular, extendable and easy-to-use pipeline for Hungarian, which was suitable for non-specialists and developers alike.

Corpora: Multimodal HuComTech Corpus, Hungarian Webcorpus, Hungarian National Corpus, 4lang, Hungarian Generative Diachronic Syntax etc.

Language technology tools: Hunalign, Hunmorph, HunToken, MetaMorpho, Hungarian Nooj, Mazsola, magyarlanc etc.