The Language Resource Switchboard

Abstract

The CLARIN infrastructure gives users access to an increasingly rich set of language-related
resources. While there is ample support for searching resources using metadata-based
search, or full-text search, or for aggregating resources into virtual collections, there is little
support for users to help them processing resources in one way or another. While there is a
considerable number of processing software in the linguistics community, there is no single point of
access where users can find tools to fit their needs and the resources they have. In this paper,
we present the Language Resource Switchboard (LRS), which aims at helping users to connect
resources with the tools that can process them. The LRS lists all applicable tools for a given
resource, lists the tasks the tools can achieve, and invokes the selected tool in such a way so
that processing can start immediately without any or little prior tool parameterization.