On 11 -12 February, the Strategy Days organized by CLARIN ERIC took place in Athens.

The main objective of this two-day meeting was to define CLARIN’s strategic goals for the next five years across CLARIN focus areas - users, language resources and tools, technical infrastructure and overall governance. Special attention was given to artificial intelligence and how CLARIN can further strengthen its role as a trusted repository of language data and a knowledge hub for user support.

During the Strategy Days, the National Coordinator Forum (NCF)meeting also took place. At this meeting, national coordinators exchanged updates on major activities in the Member States and the CLARIN Board of Directors presented CLARIN ERIC’s recent achievements and outlined plans for the future. During this meeting national coordinators also discussed best ways to  align national CLARIN activities and plans with the overall strategy of CLARIN ERIC.

The CLARIN Annual Conference took place in Vienna from September 30 till October 2. 

The CLARIN Annual Conference is the main annual event for those working on the construction and operation of CLARIN across Europe, as well as for representatives of the communities of use in the humanities and social sciences. This year conference focused on language technologies in the age of artificial intelligence.  At the CLARIN Bazaar session associate professor Zigrīda Vinčela from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Latvia introduced to the use of CLARIN tools for the extraction of linguistic expression of identity from the works of Latvian diaspora writers (see poster). Researchers from the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Latvia presented speech resources available from the korpuss.lv and CLARIN-LV repository and introduced to the LATE platform for transcribing speech data (see poster). In PhD poster session, doctoral students from the CLARIN consortium countries presented their research. Latvia in this PhD session was represented in this session by RTU Liepāja doctoral student Guna-Rābante Buša with a poster presentation on the phonetical changes of the consonants in the connected speech.

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The year 2025 marked an important milestone in the activities of CLARIN Latvia (CLARIN-LV, as it continued to expand and enhance its repository of language resources and tools.

Throughout the year, CLARIN-LV actively introduced the CLARIN research infrastructure to students, academic staff, and researchers highlighting its value for research and innovation. CLARIN Latvia also strengthened national and international collaboration, fostered knowledge exchange within Latvian research community and CLARIN ERIC consortium.

To promote access to high-quality data for researchers in the humanities and social sciences, the CLARIN-LV repositorywas enriched with new digital language resources, including speech corpora, lexical databases, and dictionaries. The most viewed language resources from the repository  were Tēzaurs.lv (more than 1000 views per month), the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian (around 250 views per month), and the LATE Dev&Test Set for ASR (around 220 views per month). Significant contributions to the repository’s content were made by the DHELI and Language Technology Initiativeprojects. Although most language resources are open access, more than 120 users have registered in the CLARIN-LV repository—not only from Latvia, but also from the Netherlands, Iceland, Poland, Sweden, and other countries.

In cooperation with other members of the CLARIN ERIC consortium, the CLARIN Flagship Project PressMint was launched to compile a multilingual, comparable, annotated, translated and interoperable set of corpora of European historical newspapers from around the start of the 20th century. Two CLARIN-LV consortium members - the National Library of Latvia and the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Latvia – participates in this project. CLARIN-LV also became a member of the CLARIN Knowledge Centre on Large Language Models for the Humanities and Social Sciences (LLMs4SSH), established in 2025.

CLARIN infrastructure and language resources were introduced to the computer science students in the course “Fundamentals of Language Technologies” as well as to linguistics students in the course “Introduction to Computational Linguistics.” In December, CLARIN-LV organized a practical workshop for university teachers on the Digital Humanities course registry, where participants learned how to register courses.

On March 5, 2026, the CLARIN&DARIAH Spring Conference took place at the University of Latvia, bringing together more than sixty researchers and practitioners from the digital humanities, language technology, memory institutions and research data infrastructures.   

A central theme running through the programme was what researchers, institutions, and society expect from research infrastructures — and how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping humanities research and work with language resources. In the morning session, associate professor Andrius Utka from the Vytautas Magnus University introduced the CLARIN-LT research infrastructure and recent Lithuanian language resources developed for the AI ​​era, emphasising that high-quality language data and reliable access to it are becoming critical for both the development of language technologies and research. Ahmad Kamal from Linnaeus University in Sweden then provided an insight into the activities of DARIAH-SE, offering the perspectives of the Swedish national node of DARIAH. 

The conference participants particularly valued the demonstration session, which showcased newly developed tools and resources and illustrated their practical use in research. Demonstrations covered various digital tools and language resources, including the Latvian language morpheme and word formation database, the Norma corpus and technical formatting tool, the DataverseLV research data repository, resources for digitization and analysis of folk song texts and melodies, an image search tool from the Latvian State Archives of Audiovisual Documents, LATE speech transcription tool, AI tools for book cataloguing, the Historical Dictionary of Latvian Given Names and Livonian language digital resources.  

The conferences concluded with a panel discussion, “Humanities in the Age of AI: What Do We Expect from Infrastructures?” Speakers and participants highlighted practical needs, such as sustainable data storage and access to data, a shared ecosystem of tools, and closer cooperation between researchers, memory institutions and technology developers. The panel discussion clearly showed that in the AI ​​era, the importance of research infrastructures is only increasing- enabling language resources, cultural heritage and research data to be usable, comparable and sustainable for both academia and society. Conference presentations are available here.