The 2017 Annual CLARIN Conference was held in the beautiful city of Budapest. At the Opening Ceremony on Monday afternoon, the audience were greeted with “Welcome back to Budapest!”
The reason for this, as explained by the Hungarian host, Tamás Varádi, was that the very first meetings to plan the proposal for the CLARIN preparatory phase were held in Budapest in 2006 at the Science Academy (MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet). Judging from the success of the conference and the infrastructure, CLARIN has gone from strength to strength over the last 12 years. After the introduction, there was a very engaging presentation of research performed by Karina van Dalen-Oskam from the University of Amsterdam/Huygens ING on how readers in the Netherlands, the UK, Germany and France rated the literary value and overall quality of a large selection of both native language and translated books. Some interesting findings were that the majority of readers thought that their native language books were the best quality overall and that in each case, the top 10 most literary titles were all written by men. These findings point to the need for further investigation into the quality of the translations and possibly the types of books written by men and women since “chick-lit” is predominantly female but not considered to be very literary! Monday concluded with two presentations on web services for stylometry (the statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another) followed by a tram trip to the Academy of Sciences for a reception.
[pullquote]PARTHENOS was represented by Matej Ďurčo along with Matteo Lorenzini and Go Sugimoto from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW) who presented a paper on mapping from the CMDI to PARTHENOS.[/pullquote] The presentations on Tuesday focussed more on the CLARIN Infrastructure and the services provided. There were several examples of ongoing research projects. After lunch, the CLARIN Bazaar featured several posters including PARTHENOS and the foyer was buzzing with participants who showed great interest in the variety of projects and services that were on show. This was followed by an invited speaker, Piek Vossen whose talk was about how multi-lingual and cross-lingual processing and two more thematic papers. After a brief break, it was time for the trams again and a trip to the riverside for the conference dinner which was held on the Zsófia Event Boat which cruises along the river allowing the diners to enjoy the stunning Parliament building along with the bridges and other iconic landmarks.The final day started with the presentation of four papers that covered various integral aspects of CLARIN such as metadata, best practices, implementation of the Open Science Policy and a study on Web user behaviours when using the CLARIN infrastructure. This was followed by a very fast poster slam which was basically a short introduction to posters and demos being shown in the next session prior to lunch. PARTHENOS was represented by Matej Ďurčo along with Matteo Lorenzini and Go Sugimoto from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW) who presented a paper on mapping from the CMDI to PARTHENOS. After lunch, Menzo Windhouwer provided an overview of the current state of the technical infrastructure and plans for future developments. This was followed by the Award Ceremony and a presentation by the Board of Directors before the close of the conference.
The full programme and presentations are available from the CLARIN website: https://www.clarin.eu/content/programme-clarin-annual-conference-2017