Language resource

In linguistics and language technology, a language resource is a "[composition] of linguistic material used in the construction, improvement and/or evaluation of language processing applications, (...) in language and language-mediated research studies and applications."^[1]

According to Bird & Simons (2003),^[2] this includes

1. data, i.e. "any information that documents or describes a language, such as a published monograph, a computer data file, or even a shoebox full of handwritten index cards. The information could range in content from unanalyzed sound recordings to fully transcribed and annotated texts to a complete descriptive grammar",^[2]
2. tools, i.e., "computational resources that facilitate creating, viewing, querying, or otherwise using language data",^[2] and
3. advice, i.e., "any information about what data sources are reliable, what tools are appropriate in a given situation, what practices to follow when creating new data". The latter aspect is usually referred to as "best practices" or "(community) standards".^[2]

In a narrower sense, language resource is specifically applied to resources that are available in digital form, and then, "encompassing (a) data sets (textual, multimodal/multimedia and lexical data, grammars, language models, etc.) in machine readable form, and (b) tools/technologies/services used for their processing and management".^[1]