ELRA board elections: candidate Francesca Frontini
Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, CNR,
Pisa & CLARIN ERIC Board of Directors
https://sites.google.com/site/francescafrontini/Home
My motivations for candidating myself for the ELRA board lie in my academic and professional history, both of which are deeply embedded in the Language Resources and Technologies (LRT) community and which you can find in my bio below.
If elected, I will build on my international and interdisciplinary experience to help consolidate the role of ELRA at various levels, ensuring a smooth collaboration with different relevant initiatives as well as promoting ELRA’s involvement in relevant projects and its visibility within European research bodies. In particular, my position as one of the directors of the CLARIN ERIC infrastructure (a position that has been renewed until 2024) will contribute to further strengthening the ELRA-CLARIN Collaboration Agreement signed in 2018. I will put my experience in the governance of an international body at the service of the ELRA board, creating links with the SSH Open Science Cluster and the EOSC, in addition to assuring the visibility of ELRA and its catalogue in the SSHOC and EOSC marketplaces, as well as promoting an effective collaboration between ELRA, CLARIN and the future Language Data Space. Finally, my election will ensure that ILC-CNR, a member of the association since its foundation in 1995, and which has always been involved in the definition of its policies as well as in various ELRA activities, is represented with an elected member in the board. I commit to discharging my duties with diligence and to proactively participating in the initiatives and activities of the board to the best of my abilities.
After gaining a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pavia, I began my career in 2010 as a Postdoctoral researcher at the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ILC) in Pisa, in the research unit then led by Nicoletta Calzolari. There, I worked on several projects that became key to the LRT field, including FLaReNet, Panacea, Meta-Net and Kyoto. In particular, I was involved in the creation of lexical resources, the definition of standards for data and metadata, and the development of NLP pipelines. The collaboration between ILC and ELRA was and continues to be extensive both in terms of single projects as well as in the organisation of the LREC conferences. It was during this period that ideas such as the LRE map originated and that I developed an interest in the documentation and sharing of Language Resources as our community began to implement practices that very much anticipated what would later become the FAIR principles. It was also in these years that the CLARIN ERIC infrastructure began to establish itself as an important presence in the LRT panorama.
In September 2014, after winning a Fernand Braudel mobility scholarship, I joined the OBVIL laboratory in Paris for 9 months. There I was fortunate to be part of a laboratory where the collaboration between Digital Humanities (DH) and LRT was at its most fruitful, participating and initiating works on stylometric patterns extraction as well as Named Entity Recognition and Linking. This work brought me in contact with an international group of colleagues and led to the creation of a Digital Literary Stylistic SIG within ADHO; I sat on the board from its creation till 2022.
Shortly after my return at ILC in 2015 Italy became a full member of CLARIN ERIC and I was involved in the creation of a national consortium (led by Monica Monachini), acting for a short time as representative in the Centre Committee. In September 2016, I obtained a position as Maitre de Conferences at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III (UPVM) and became part of the Praxiling CNRS lab, while retaining an associate position at ILC. I stayed at UPVM till 2020, and during these years I participated in several projects (in some of these as research unit leader) which were situated in the intersection between corpus linguistics, digital humanities, computational lexicography. Again in this period, I co-edited two important special issues in French journals, one for the TAL journal on NLP and DH and one on Spatial Humanities for Humanités numériques journal. I also became involved in the revision of the ISO-LMF standard thanks to my nomination as an AFNOR and ISO expert. Related to this, I have been involved over the years in W3C activities for the development of the Ontolex Lemon model. Thanks to this experience, I represented France in the CLARIN Standard Committee.
I returned to ILC in Pisa in September 2020 as a tenured researcher, and shortly afterwards became a member of the CLARIN ERIC Board of Directors. In this capacity, I participate in the governance of the infrastructure with a special focus on user involvement (with the organisation of initiatives such as the CLARIN cafés) but also, more and more, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). In particular, I participated in the SSHOC cluster project (building strong links with the other infrastructures of our domain, in particular DARIAH and CESSDA) and am a member of the EOSC task force on Data Stewardship. Recently, I have been active in defining the role and contribution of CLARIN within the future Language Data Space. As a member of the CLARIN-IT team, I am a work package leader in the development of H2IOSC, a new national research infrastructure for the humanities and heritage.
Today I am an established member of the LRT community, and author of over 100 publications. Over the years I have participated in the organisation of several editions of LREC, co-organised related workshops and was a member of scientific committees of various conferences in our field. I have cultivated a strong network of international relationships, and am regularly invited for talks and panels. Finally, I have supervised MA and PhD theses, and am a lecturer at the Universities of Montpellier and Calabria, teaching about Language Resources creation and documentation in two Scientific Data Management masters.
