Charles University offers infrastructural capacity to fight SARS‑CoV‑2 and COVID‑19

In addition, the research infrastructure will provide unlimited access its software tools and web services for natural language processing in over 80 languages for applications related to processing language data, such as social network analytics.

In both cases, an expedite approval will be given to applicants through the management of the research infrastructure and its host Institution.

Special web page has been created at https://covid.ufal.mff.cuni.cz, where interested parties find all they need to apply, including technical details, capacities and links to more documentation of the tools offered; general description can also be found at the usual place at LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ (https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/en/services).

Even though teaching and research continues both at the Institute and at LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ without interruption, even if remotely, this internal capacity has been freed due to cancellations or postponements of international events for which data have been being prepared. Consequently, these capacities have been restructured and made available for external users following the ESFRI  (https://www.esfri.eu/, European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) call asking for help with the fight against the pandemic. Additional information is provided at the web of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports devoted to Research Infrastructures (https://www.vyzkumne-infrastruktury.cz/2020/03/lindat-clariah-ufal-mff-uk-boj-covid-19/), where references to other Czech and international research infrastructures that responded to the call can be found.

LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ is a joint distributed Czech national node of the pan-European CLARIN ERIC (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) and DARIAH ERIC (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) networks. It consists of 11 research organisations, which are active in the domain of humanities and arts in the Czech Republic – in linguistics, history and historical bibliography, culture and science on culture, the history of arts, philosophy, film culture, visual arts, musicology and the history of music, ethnology, folklore, archaeology and also in some cross-disciplinary domains.

The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University was established in 1990 as a continuation of the research and teaching activities of the former Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics, which existed since the early 1960s at the Faculty of Arts and later at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. The Department is primarily a research institution focusing on many topics in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing. It participates in many research projects at national and international level. It also coordinates the large research infrastructure LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ, which supports research in the Czech Republic and abroad by providing language resources, tools and services in the field of Language Technologies and Digital Humanities. The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics offers a comprehensive curriculum for both bachelor's and master's degrees (Bc., Mgr.) and doctoral degree (Ph.D.) in Computational Linguistics. All programs are taught in Czech and English. The Institute is also a member of the double degree Master's program LCT, supported by the European Union.

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