Categorizing legal features in a metadata-oriented task: defining the conditions of use
Proceedings of the Workshop on Ethical and Legal Issues in Human Language Technologies and Multilingual De-Identification of Sensitive Data In Language Resources within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Abstract
In recent times, more attention has been brought by the Human Language Technology (HLT) community to the legal framework for making available and reusing Language Resources (LR) and tools. Licensing is now an issue that is foreseen in most research projects and that is essential to provide legal certainty for repositories when distributing resources. Some repositories such as Zenodo or Quantum Stat do not offer the possibility to search for resources by licenses which can turn the searching for relevant resources a very complex task. Other repositories such as Hugging Face propose a search feature by license which may make it difficult to figure out what use can be made of such resources. During the European Language Grid (ELG) project, we moved a step forward to link metadata with the terms and conditions of use. In this paper, we document the process we undertook to categorize legal features of licenses listed in the SPDX license list and widely used in the HLT community as well as those licenses used within the ELG platform