Swiss-AL: Platform for Language Data in Applied Sciences

Abstract

Open Science is transforming the way researchers collect, process, analyze, and store empirical research data, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, where language data is crucial. This transformation process especially concerns developers and providers of large language corpora and manifests itself in at least three challenges when providing these corpora as Open Research Data (ORD). Challenges concern heterogeneous practices that researchers apply when working with language data, research data lifecycle, and legal and ethical aspect. In this paper, we present Swiss-AL, a language data platform developed in Switzerland that is being transformed into an Open Research Data Resource for Applied Sciences within the Swiss Open Science Strategy. The paper gives an overview over the data contained in Swiss-AL and the infrastructure that is used to process and analyze the data. Furthermore, it presents approaches to the three abovementioned challenges to language ORD.