One of CLARIN's priorities is to support the young researchers. CLARIN develops teaching materials and supports participation of PhD students in CLARIN conferences and other community activities. To showcase doctoral research that makes use of CLARIN language resources and tools, this year's Tour de CLARIN features Young Scholars Special Edition. The latest issue includes an interview with RTU Liepāja doctoral student Guna Rābante-Buša.

In the interview, Guna Rābante-Buša discusses her research on Latvian speech and phonetics, with a particular focus on creating high-quality speech corpora and language resources. For research Guna uses several Latvian speech corpora, including LATE-conversational, LATE-media, the phonetically annotated corpus fonLATE, and BalsuTalka. She explains that reliable speech datasets are essential not only for linguistic research but also for development of modern speech technologies such as automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis.  The interview also highlights the challenges of working with a less-resourced language such as Latvian.

The interview further emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between linguists, engineers, and computer scientists. CLARIN plays a key role in this process by providing infrastructure that enables language resources to be shared, accessed, and reused by the international research community.

Finally, Guna Rābante-Buša encourages young researchers to combine expertise in linguistics with digital technologies. She believes that the future of language research lies in interdisciplinary work and in developing open, FAIR language resources that can benefit both the scientific community and society through improved language technologies.