The CLARIN open scientific infrastructure in Poland celebrates its 10th anniversary. On this occasion, a conference was organized at Wrocław University of Science and Technology to summarise the achievements of the project, or in fact the projects being part of this large scientific undertaking.

CLARIN is a European scientific and technological infrastructure providing linguistic resources and electronic tools for automatic natural language processing. Its Polish part is represented by the CLARIN-PL consortium, established in 2013 and led by Wrocław University of Science and Technology. It develops and provides open access to digital linguistic data sets and digital tools for research purposes in the humanities and social sciences.

The heart of the project is the Language Technologies Centre, which is located in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at our Faculty. This is where the technical infrastructure of CLARIN-PL is located and where researchers develop numerous IT tools that are changing the face of the Polish humanities. This is because Clarin is a unique infrastructure created specifically for the Polish language. It includes specialized data sets and technical capabilities developed in order to conduct research on large amounts of texts, including those in the field of machine language processing and artificial intelligence.

The users of the Clarin Infrastructure include scientists, researchers and educators, students, PhD students, entrepreneurs, employees of public benefit organizations, local governments, public administration and everyone who is interested in language processing technologies, artificial intelligence and the development of digital humanities and social sciences.

It is led by Prof. Maciej Piasecki who speaks about it with satisfaction: „We are happy that we can use Clarin to do things that are not just useful, but useful for a good end. The tools that we develop here not only support research, but give researchers greater opportunities. Of course, it's not that the humanities cannot function without computer science, but thanks to our tools, it is possible to broaden the research perspective in the humanities. And that is of certain value.

It is worth adding that the support provided by Clarin is very extensive and free of charge. Our experts working for the project develop IT tools useful for specific research, or adapt existing tools to a given research project, e.g. applications, language corpora, repositories, databases or plWordNet – our Polish relational semantic dictionary. They also help obtain funding for the development of such tools and provide professional support already at the stage of the research concept and planning.

Conference program available here.