CLASSLA-Express: a Train of CLARIN.SI Workshops on Language Resources and Tools with Easily Expanding Route
Nikola Ljubešić, Taja Kuzman, Ivana Filipović Petrović, Jelena Parizoska, Petya Osenova
TL;DR
The paper presents CLASSLA-Express as a train-like series of in-country workshops to disseminate CLARIN.SI resources and the CLASSLA Knowledge Centre. It details the goals, content, and first iteration, including six half-day workshops across five countries that train participants to work with the CLASSLA-web corpora and CLASSLA-Stanza, with multilingual materials and scalable expansion capabilities. Promotional strategies and the development of hosting templates and multilingual teaching resources are described, along with the potential to extend to new venues and incorporate large language model workflows. The work demonstrates a scalable, environmentally mindful model for broadening access to South Slavic linguistic resources, with promising momentum for future growth across additional countries and languages.
Abstract
This paper introduces the CLASSLA-Express workshop series as an innovative approach to disseminating linguistic resources and infrastructure provided by the CLASSLA Knowledge Centre for South Slavic languages and the Slovenian CLARIN.SI infrastructure. The workshop series employs two key strategies: (1) conducting workshops directly in countries with interested audiences, and (2) designing the series for easy expansion to new venues. The first iteration of the CLASSLA-Express workshop series encompasses 6 workshops in 5 countries. Its goal is to share knowledge on the use of corpus querying tools, as well as the recently-released CLASSLA-web corpora - the largest general corpora for South Slavic languages. In the paper, we present the design of the workshop series, its current scope and the effortless extensions of the workshop to new venues that are already in sight.