ELRA is the short name given to the European Languages Resources Association, which was established as a non-profit organisation in Luxemburg in 1995, as the official webpage of ELRA tells us. It’s main aim is “to make available the language resources for language engineering and to evaluate language engineering technologies”.

ELRA tries to achieve its goal by being active in several aspects inside the broad theme of Language Resources. ELRA is “active in identification, distribution, collection, validation, standardisation, improvement, in promoting the production of language resources, in supporting the infrastructure to perform evaluation campaigns and in developing a scientific field of language resources and evaluation”. This activities are achieved in ELDA, the operational body of European Languages Resources Association.

 Associations mission is to promote language resources for Human Language Technologies (HLT) and to evaluate engineerings technologies of languages. To achive this mission, ELRA provides us several services, such as identification of language resources or distribution of these resources, as I said in the previous paragraph.  But the association also publishes a newsletter and makes market studies in the field of HLT. In doing this, we can say that ELRA is helping in the promotion and expansion of Human Language Technologies. 

ELRA was created by RELATOR, a project by the European Commission and a large key players with a consortium of researches working in the nine official languages of the European Union (EU). The main achievement of this project was the creation of ELRA.

Finally, I will recommend the interested reader to visit the official webpage of the association. There, we can learn about ELRA’s and ELDA’s history, about the services they provide us, etc. It is a very interesting webpage if you’re interested on the theme of Language Technologies.