Italian Language Resources. From CLARIN-IT to the VLO and Back: Sketching a Methodology for Monitoring LRs Visibility

This paper sketches a user-oriented, qualitative methodology for both (i) monitoring the existence and availability of language resources relevant for a given CLARIN national community and language and (ii) assessing the offering potential of CLARIN, in terms of Language Resources provided to national consortia. From the user perspective, the methodology has been applied to investigate the visibility of language resources available for Italian within the CLARIN central services, in particular the Virtual Language Observatory. As a proof-of-concept, the methodology has been tested on the resources available through the CLARIN-IT data centres, but, ideally, it could be applied by any national data centre aiming to assess the existence of LRs in CLARIN for any given languages and check their accessibility for the interested users. It is thus argued that such an assessment might be a useful instrument in the hands of national coordinators and centre managers for (i) bringing to the fore both strengths and critical issues about their data providing community and (ii) for planning targeted actions to improve and increase both visibility and accessibility of their LRs.