CLARIN Workshop "Database Enterprise for Language and Speech Disorders (DELAD)", Cork 2017

Corpora of disordered speech (CSD) are hard to obtain. They are costly to collect and difficult to share due to privacy issues. Moreover, they are often small in size and very dedicated in terms of language impairments addressed. These factors make re-use a challenge on the one hand, and a necessity on the other.

Two of the co-applicants (Ball & Müller) organised two workshops in Linköping, Sweden, in 2015 and 2016, in which available resources and issues related to accessibility were inventorised. These workshops resulted in the DELAD initiative. From these workshops it was concluded (1) that only a minority of existing CSD can be made accessible due to privacy constraints, and (2) that we now have the knowhow to collect new CSD that can be shared according to FAIR principles, (3) that the CLARIN infrastructure is indispensable for this purpose.

This CLARIN Type I workshop took place in Cork, Ireland, on 15-17 November 2017. We brought together a selected group of experts in language disorders research and CSD to set-up a plan to collect existing and new CSD and to include these in the CLARIN infrastructure. The action plan resulting from the workshop should include concrete initiatives to set up a repository of existing and new CSD embedded in the CLARIN infrastructure. The report and action plan can be retrieved from this webpage.