The Foundation of the Validation Committee

Language Resources (LR) must have a certain degree of quality to be useful at all; validating language resources consists of checking their quality. According to its statutes (article 1), ELRA has to take care of the validation of the LR available in its catalogue. To perform this task, a validation committee, VCom, initiated by Harald Höge, was set up by the Board, on 23rd October 2000. At that time, the founding members of VCom were members of the ELRA Board as well. Since then, VCom has been open to non Board members.

The Mission of VCom

The aim of VCom is to maximize the "ease of use" and "suitability" of the language resources which may be needed for LE-systems, such as speech recognition or character recognition or information retrieval systems.

For promoting "ease of use", VCom pushes forward the quality of language resources i.e. providing language resources with optimal documentation and minimal errors. For promoting "suitability", the VCom supports standards and best practices for language resources leading to best performance of state of the art LE-systems.

The tasks of VCom and of its operational units

Due to the generic work of VCom, most issues are usually handled by all of the VCom members. Currently, the operational units of the VCom are SPEX and CST.

ELDA, as the operational body of ELRA, implements services and supports strategic tasks as defined by VCom.

VCom tasks
 Define and supervise tasks performed by the operational units
 Establish and optimize the organisation of VCom
 Propose and control budget of VCom
 Prepare contracts with operational units
 Report to the board of ELRA

Operational units’ tasks
 Describe the quality of existing LR
 Improve the quality of existing LR
 Communicate with users and producers of LR
 Promote standards and best practices
 Maintain the ELRA web pages concerning validation, according to the progress achieved within VCom
 Maintain their LR validation portal

Members of VCom

 Nuria Bel
 Nicoletta Calzolari
 Khalid Choukri (ELRA CEO)
 Christian Fluhr
 Jochen Friedrich
 Jan Odijk (Convenor)
 Francesco Senia