| About ELRA Membership | Members’ Benefits | Membership Fees | Membership Fidelity Program | Latest ELRA Services |
About ELRA Membership ( ELRA Membership Form )
ELRA members include institutions (academic groups and research laboratories) and companies (industrial and commercial organisations) from all over the world (nearly all the countries of the European Union are represented).
These institutions and companies belong to sectors like telecommunication, marketing, multilingual business, etc., and deal with Human Language Technologies (HLT), especially with speech, text and terminology.
ELRA membership is open to any organisation, public or private, European or non-European. However, full membership, with voting rights, is available only to organisations legally established in Europe (for details, see Statutes: Article 5).
You will find below a few reasons to join us and become an ELRA member:
● Price discounts on the resources, up to 70% reduction on some items. In addition, discounts on related technical publications, commercial reports, etc.
● Apart from the wide range of resources in the catalogue, members can at any time turn to ELRA for information on other databases available or databases being developed.
● Legal and contractual assistance are provided to the ELRA members. This could be when you are negotiating for a resource with a producer or if you need information on other contractual or legal matters.
● All publications are sent to members on a regular basis. Special News and Updates on association affairs are issued via e-mail in the monthly Members Bulletin. The ELRA Web site features a section for members only, where internal reports and statistics can be found.
● LRs produced by ELRA will be exclusively distributed by ELRA, with substantial price discounts for the ELRA members.
● Validation manuals have been prepared by Validation Centres for Written and Speech LRs appointed by ELRA (Centre for Sprogteknologi, Denmark and SPEX, Speech Processing Expertise centre, The Netherlands, respectively) and are available from the ELRA website.
● ELRA members enjoy first-hand information on the results from the ELRA studies.
● Membership gives you the opportunity to influence the future development of the whole LE/LR market.
Membership Fees
The annual membership fees are as follows:
| Non-profit making organisations | 750 € |
| European small/medium-sized companies (< 50 employees) | 1000 € |
| European profit making organisations (>= 50 employees) | 1500 € |
| Non-European profit making organisations | 5000 € |
Please contact us if you have any suggestion and/or comments or if you need any further details. This way, you can help to ensure that ELRA reflects the true needs of European companies and organisations in the years to come.
The principle of the fidelity program, set up to reward loyal members, is to earn miles by joining and remaining member of our association.
Miles, what for?
The awarded miles can be used by members, once earned, for:
- The payment of membership fees
- The payment of registration fees to LREC and other events organized by the association
- The purchase of the Language Resources from the ELRA catalogue with additional discount.
How many miles?
This depends on the type of the institution, and therefore on the membership fee. The number of miles per year that can be earned is currently as follows:
| Non-profit making organisation | 200 miles |
| European small/medium-sized companies (< 50 employees) | 250 miles |
| European profit making organisations (>= 50 employees) | 375 miles |
| Non-European profit making organisations | 1250 miles |
Rules
The use and earning of miles is subject to the following rules:
- If membership fee is paid before July 1st, the member gets the annual number of miles immediately.
- If membership fee is paid after July 1st, the member is entitled to keep the miles acquired so far but the member will not earn miles for the current year (all other member benefits still apply, e.g. reduced price on resources, on LREC registration fees, etc.). The rule does not apply to new members who can join anytime and earn miles for that 1st year.
- If membership fee has not been paid by December 31st, all the miles acquired so far are lost.
Miles can be used as soon as they are earned for all ELRA services. Exceptionally, for 2005, the 1st July deadline will not apply.
Examples:
- After 2 years (2005 and 2006), a not-for-profit institution will have earned 400 miles (200 each year) and will be able to register 3 students for LREC2006.
- After 4 years, any institution member of ELRA will have earned enough miles to get a free membership for one year.
More information on how to pay membership fee with miles.
● The R&D Catalogue: A subset of the Catalogue of Language Resources is now dedicated to academic research and provides a list of Language Resources, available at very affordable prices, and dedicated to a research use. So as to facilitate the access to this list, the interface and browsing tools are similar to those used in the Catalogue.
● The Universal Catalogue: In addition to the ELRA catalogue of LRs, the Universal Catalogue is a new service offered to ELRA members who will be given an early access to browse through all resources identified by ELRA before they become part of the catalogue.
● The HLT Evaluation Portal: This portal aims to offer protocols and packages for language technologies.
● The Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE) Journal: The LRE Journal, published by Springer, is the first publication devoted to the acquisition, creation, annotation, and use of LRs, together with methods for evaluation of resources, technologies, and applications. Special prices are offered to ELRA members.