Technology is becoming ever more available, and our advice is that most energy, especially for bottom-up infrastructure building, should be invested in the production of manually annotated datasets. Once high-quality manually annotated data are available, it is quite easy to train different tools on that data. On top of that, machine-learning-based technology is nowadays developing at an unprecedented pace and the best bet for making an infrastructure future-proof is to invest in high-quality manually-annotated data. While we are still improving, and heavily using the CLASSLA pipeline, it is obvious that BERT-like pre-trained language models will be production-ready in the very near future. The code base for this new paradigm will be developed by large infrastructures and companies, and smart small infrastructures, especially the bottom-up ones, will be waiting in the wings with high-quality training data, ready for when the technology ripens and is easily offered to the users of the infrastructure.

### **6.3 Funding bottom-up infrastructure building**

On the question of funding and running infrastructures, the situation is rather simple for the infrastructures being built top-down – these mostly receive significant national funding and have the necessary organizational capacity. For those infrastructures that have to be built bottom-up, we suggest the following.

International funding is much preferred, as national funding can be very hard to obtain, which is likely one of the reasons for the specific infrastructure not being built top-down in the first place. The Croatian and Serbian bottom-up infrastructure efforts were mostly supported by international funding.

Collaboration with other infrastructures-to-be that are in a similar bottom-up situation is highly advisable on the financial level as well. Any funding is much more likely to be obtained with joint forces. The good example are Croatian and Serbian joint efforts in obtaining funding.

There is no such thing as bad or too little funding. Work on the Croatian and Serbian user-generated content infrastructure was started on a project that only received a few thousand euros in funding.

It is worth coordinating efforts with top-down infrastructures as well, as this type of coordination effort might bring you by far the most return. Do not feel like you are exploiting someone: the other side will benefit from the collaboration as well, just as the Slovenian infrastructure has benefited from working on Croatian and Serbian.

Most activities need to be performed in an iterative manner. This is often the case even for top-down approaches, and when the funding is lacking, and conditions are far from optimal, the probability of obtaining a major single-run result is rather low. The Croatian standard-language training dataset came to its current size through three expansions and many more quality improvement iterations, another one being performed as we write.

Performing linguistic research alongside infrastructure building activities will inform these activities enormously. Research infrastructure building is full of pitfalls and identifying them early on is crucial. In our case, the user-generated-content infrastructure building profited enormously from the early observation that most data in this type of content is actually standard. This seemingly simple observation significantly changed the direction of the infrastructure development for all three languages.

### **7 Conclusion**

This chapter has described the rather different roads to language technology development taken by three South Slavic languages. While the development in Slovenia has been predominantly top-down, relying on strategic documents and targeted funding, the developments in Croatia and Serbia have been rather bottom-up and most results have been achieved via smaller projects not formally embedded in any wider-scope strategy of infrastructure building. We have also shown the benefits of two types of collaboration between infrastructures(-to-be). The first type is between two bottom-up initiatives, for Croatian and Serbian, that was mostly driven by international funding, breaking the vicious circle related to the lack of national strategy, political will and funding for infrastructure building. The second type of collaboration, between top-down and bottom-up infrastructures, was illustrated on the collaboration between JANES and ReLDI projects. These two types of collaboration, together with CLARIN.SI as an overarching institutional framework, resulted in a crucial aggregation of resources and competences, which can now be streamed towards efficient future joint developments. The direction for scaling up these future developments is set by the recent establishment of the CLASSLA CLARIN knowledge centre.

We hope that this contribution will motivate further research in infrastructure development methodology in general, and especially on the coordination of infrastructure developments for related languages. We hope even more that it will enhance the practice of coordinating infrastructure developments, especially in the case of communities and languages that lack the socio-economic support necessary for the development of a top-down language technology infrastructure. The types of coordination that we have described in this chapter are, in our opinion, the best chance communities and languages have to kick-start an infrastructure development and ensure the functioning of a language in the digital age.

**Acknowledgment:** The results presented in this work have been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant IZ74Z0\_160501 (ReLDI), the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under grant agreement PIAP-GA-2012-324414 (Abu-MaTran), the Slovenian Research Agency within the national basic research project "Resources, Tools and Methods for the Research of Nonstandard Internet Slovene" (J6-6842, 2014–2017), and the Slovenian research infrastructure CLARIN.SI.

The authors also acknowledge the financial support from the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding No. P6-0411 Language resources and technologies for Slovene language), from the European Union's Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014–2020) project IMSyPP (Innovative Monitoring Systems and Prevention Policies of Online Hate Speech, grant no. 875263), the Slovenian Research Agency and the Flemish Research Foundation bilateral research project LiLaH (The linguistic landscape of hate speech on social media, grant no. ARRS-N6-0099 and FWO-G070619N), and the Slovenian Research Agency and the Serbian Ministry of Education bilateral project "The Construction of Corpora and Lexica of Non-standard Serbian and Slovenian" (BI-RS/14-15-068).

## **Bibliography**

### Paweł Kamocki, Aleksei Kelli, and Krister Lindén **The CLARIN Committee for Legal and Ethical Issues and the Normative Layer of the CLARIN Infrastructure**

Ville Oksanen, in Memoriam (26 December 1976– 23 November 2014)

**Abstract:** The normative layer of CLARIN is, alongside the organizational and technical layers, an essential part of the infrastructure. It consists of the regulatory framework (statutory law, case law, authoritative guidelines, etc.), the contractual framework (licenses, terms of service, etc.), and ethical norms. Navigating the normative layer requires expertise, experience, and qualified effort. In order to advise the Board of Directors, a standing committee dedicated to legal and ethical issues, the CLIC, was created. Since its establishment in 2012, the CLIC has made considerable efforts to provide not only the BoD but also the general public with information and guidance. It has published many articles (both in proceedings of CLARIN conferences and in its own White Paper Series) and developed several LegalTech tools. It also runs a Legal Information Platform, where accessible information on various issues affecting language resources can be found.

**Keywords:** CLIC, copyright, license, ethics

### **1 Introduction**

CLARIN, just like any research infrastructure (and most infrastructures for that matter), is a shared (or *common*) resource: instead of being privately owned, it is managed by a community for the benefit of all its members, and sometimes even of the general public. Experience teaches us that in the case of shared resources, the ideal of peaceful and sustainable exploitation is particularly diffi-

**Paweł Kamocki,** Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Germany, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
**Aleksei Kelli,** University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>**Krister Lindén,** University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>cult to achieve in practice. Hardin (1968) argued that such resources are doomed to fail. To illustrate the inevitable "tragedy of the commons" (overpopulation and the resulting depletion of natural resources), Hardin quoted the example from a little-known 19th-century pamphlet (Lloyd 1980) of an overgrazed common pasture: by making an economically justifiable decision to increase the number of their cattle, individual herders cause damage to the community. This theory was criticized (if not disproven) by a 2009 Nobel prize laureate, Elinor Ostrom, who formulated a list of design principles for sustainable self-organized governance of common resources. All these principles circle around clear, effective, and enforceable community rules regulating the use of the resource (e.g., mechanisms for exclusion of non-participants, sanctions for violations, and mechanisms of conflict resolution).

Both Hardin's and Ostrom focused on natural resources, many of which are indeed in imminent danger of over-exploitation; some could argue that there is no such danger for digital and intellectual resources, which do not depreciate with use, and which can be identically reproduced at little to no cost. However, deterioration is also a menace for shared digital resources. Wikipedia, probably the most successful digital commons so far, can be quoted as an example. Wikipedia owes its success partly to its large community respecting some fundamental principles (e.g., neutrality, freedom, mutual respect) summarized in the Five Pillars, and partly to the use of "copyleft" licenses, mostly CC BY-SA, which require that any modifications be released under the same license – a condition that can, if necessary, be enforced in court. It is easy to imagine that without either of these elements, Wikipedia could quickly fork into a privately-owned commercial product, or become useless due to low quality of its content (caused by e.g., overuse of editing rights), or simply be deserted by its users and gradually forgotten. The same can happen to a digital infrastructure like CLARIN.

In addition to this, CLARIN also faces another challenge which relates to the restricted use of language resources affected by third-party rights (intellectual property and personal data protection); we can call it "the tragedy of the anticommons". In the literature, the tragedy of the anticommons is explained as follows: "The anticommons thesis is that simple: when too many people own pieces of one thing, nobody can use it. Usually, private ownership creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect – it leads to resource underuse in an anticommons" (Heller 2013: 7). It has been suggested that "Fixing anticommons tragedy is a key challenge for our time" (Heller 2013: 6).

Fortunately, efforts are continuously being made to guarantee the sustainability of CLARIN and to protect it from the tragedies of both the commons and the anticommons. These efforts take many forms: updating the technical side of the infrastructure to keep it state-of-the-art, carefully defining long-term strategic goals, or building a strong community. But no such effort would be sufficient without the legal and normative frameworks of the infrastructure, which are needed to address the use restrictions of language data and support the dissemination of language resources.

It has been argued that law and legal norms on their own are never sufficient; despite burglary being a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment, people still lock their homes, and many are willing to invest in state-of-the-art locks and alarm systems. But the reverse is also true: no lock and no alarm system would be useful if burglary was not punished by law, and burglars could spend hours in broad daylight trying to work around them. The legal (or ethical) rule comes first, and the technical and organizational solutions that safeguard it or put it into action come second. It is therefore fair to say that without the Normative Layer, neither the technical nor the organizational structure of CLARIN would exist.

This chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces and defines the notion of the Normative Layer of CLARIN, which consists of three components: the Regulatory Framework, the Contractual Framework, and Ethical Norms. Section 3 presents the CLARIN Committee for Legal and Ethical Issues (CLIC), its history, structure, missions, and tasks. Section 4 then discusses the CLIC's actions related to the Regulatory Framework, and Section 5 those related to the Contractual Framework.

### **2 The normative layer of CLARIN**

Legal norms (i.e., to put it simply, state-enforceable rules meant to regulate people's behaviour) that regulate the functioning of CLARIN can stem from external (objective) or internal (subjective) sources. We will refer to the norms stemming from the former as the Regulatory Framework, and to the latter as the Contractual Framework. These two frameworks form what we jointly refer to as the Normative Layer.

#### **2.1 The regulatory framework**

The most important part of the Regulatory Framework is statutory law, that is, acts passed by legislative bodies such as national parliaments (for national law) or by EU institutions (for EU law). From the perspective of CLARIN, the main legal challenges can be divided into two groups: intellectual property (chiefly copyright and related rights) and personal data protection. Indeed, language data potentially contains copyright-protected content (written or oral works), subject matter of related rights (performances, parts of phonograms, and databases), or personal data. These fields of law are harmonized at EU level. Therefore, the most important legal acts for CLARIN include, for example, several copyright directives, the Database Directive, the Open Data Directive, or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as a plethora of associated national laws in every CLARIN member country. In addition to this, the Regulation 723/2009 on the community legal framework for a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) is fundamental for the functioning of CLARIN ERIC; this Regulation was the basis for the European Commission's Decision of 29 February 2012, setting up the CLARIN ERIC consortium.

Another objective source of legal norms (i.e., another part of the Regulatory Framework) are court decisions, especially those emanating from the highest courts, which often – *de facto* or *de jure*, depending on the legal system – also apply beyond the facts of a specific case and provide a binding interpretation of statutes or even fill some grey areas in statutory law. For CLARIN as an entity, the most important court decisions are undeniably those emanating from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

Finally, some highly authoritative guidelines, although not binding *de jure*, can also be regarded as an objective source of legal norms, and therefore part of the Regulatory Framework. This is especially the case of guidelines emanating from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and its direct predecessor, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. The EDPB is an independent advisory body made up of representatives of Data Protection Authorities from every Member State of the European Economic Area. Its guidelines are very likely to be followed by national courts and administrative bodies and provide a *de facto* binding interpretation of the GDPR.

The Regulatory Framework form a "legal exoskeleton", independent of CLARIN ERIC's will – that is, it cannot be altered by the sole decision of CLARIN bodies and they cannot opt out of it. Instead, it needs to be integrated and navigated in the decision-making process, as well as in the day-to-day functioning of the infrastructure. However, a powerful actor like CLARIN ERIC should not adopt a completely passive attitude toward the regulatory framework; it can also try to actively influence its future shape by participating in public consultations or by lobbying efforts.

The practical impact of the Regulatory Framework (in this case, the GDPR) on the compilation of language data is amply illustrated by Lindén et al. (2022).

#### **2.2 The contractual framework**

Unlike the Regulatory Framework, the Contractual Framework is internal to CLARIN, and CLARIN bodies can exercise proactive (i.e., not retroactive) control over it.

A part of this "legal endoskeleton" discussed in this chapter consists of contracts related to the everyday functioning of the CLARIN infrastructure, that is, contracts between CLARIN centres and providers of resources or tools (DELAs, Deposition License Agreements), and between CLARIN centres and end-users (EULAs, End-User License Agreements (for every user of a given resource) and ToS, Terms of Service (for all users of a repository).

In the spirit of Open Science and according to the FAIR principles, providers are encouraged to make their resources and tools open (i.e., available to anyone and for any purpose). This is best accomplished using standardized public licenses such as Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 (for datasets), or the General Public License (GPL) 3.0 (for software). Such licenses can be analysed as offers from the rights holder to the general public (hence the name "public license"); the actual contract is formed when a member of the public accepts the offer simply by using the content. In this model, there is no middleman (such as a distributor). To respond to the growing need of the community, public licenses are also incorporated in the CLARIN Contractual Framework, as parts of DELAs and EULAs.

Since these internal rules need to comply with the Regulatory Framework (or, to continue with the skeleton metaphor, the endoskeleton cannot extend beyond the exoskeleton), they need to be regularly revised and updated to adapt to the changes in the latter.

The practical impact of the Contractual Framework on the CLARIN infrastructure is illustrated, for example, by Hajič et al. (2022).

#### **2.3 The role of ethical norms**

Ethical norms are also part of the Normative Framework. Although they are not as such enforceable by the State, they indirectly shape both the Regulatory and the Contractual frameworks.

There seems to be no fixed content in ethics, as it changes very significantly, even over short periods of time. To an extent, the scientific community has developed its own ethical codes (Merton 1942).

### **3 The CLARIN Committee for Legal and Ethical Issues**

As highlighted in the previous section, the Normative Layer of the CLARIN infrastructure is quite complex. Navigating thousands of pages of legal acts, court decisions, guidelines, and standard contracts requires considerable expertise. In order to advise the Board of Directors, the CLARIN Committee for Legal and Ethical Issues (hereinafter: the CLIC) was created.

#### **3.1 History**

The CLIC was formally established in 2012, during the first CLARIN Annual Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria (25–28 October 2012). However, even before that the CLIC existed informally (as the CLARIN Legal Issues Committee, hence the acronym). In its early days, Ville Oksanen and Krister Lindén from the University of Helsinki played the key role in the development of the CLIC.

Ville Oksanen (26 December 1976–23 November 2014) was a Finnish civic activist and lawyer known as a defender of civil rights and the freedom of expression, as well as a social debater. He defended his doctoral dissertation on digital copyright in 2008. In 2014, he was employed as a researcher at the Department of Computer Science at Aalto University. He was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Finland association and served as its president from 2004 to 2005, and was its vice-president at the time of his death. He wrote blogs for several computer magazines, and from a political point of view, Oksanen was a member of the Liberal Coalition Party. He was the Vice-Chairman of the Coalition Youth and was a deputy member of the Coalition Party Board from 1999 to 2000.

Research Director Krister Lindén, PhD in Language Technology and national coordinator of FIN-CLARIN, has a background in business, where he received hands-on training in legal issues as the first CEO of Lingsoft while negotiating with WordPerfect, Xerox, and Microsoft on including spellchecking and grammar-checking technology for all the Scandinavian languages and German in their products. He was the first chair of CLIC (2012–2015).

Erik Ketzan, a legal scholar from the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, was the first co-chair. Since the very beginning it has been a tradition that the chair and co-chair are a language researcher and a legal scholar.

In 2016, Aleksei Kelli, professor of law from the University of Tartu in Estonia, took over as chair of the CLIC. Penny Labropoulou from Athena/ILSP served as co-chair.

In 2021, Paweł Kamocki, legal expert from the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, holding both a PhD in law and a master's degree in linguistics, became chair of the CLIC. It is worth noting that he was among the original members of the CLIC when it was established in 2012, underpinning the CLIC's activities. Vanessa Hannesschläger, a digital humanities researcher from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, became co-chair.

#### **3.2 Structure**

The CLIC members are experts appointed by national consortia for two years, with a possible prolongation (Article 2 of the CLIC Bylaws). Every consortium is invited to appoint an expert, but there is no obligation to do so; as a result, several consortia are regretfully not represented in the CLIC. There is also a possibility for a consortium to appoint more than one expert – for example, Germany has always appointed two or three experts – however, only one expert per consortium (a "core member") has the right to vote. There is no formal requirement for appointed experts to be affiliated with a CLARIN centre. CLARIN observers ("emerging consortia") can appoint experts upon invitation from the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors can also appoint additional experts, or invite related initiatives to appoint representatives, but none of these powers have been used so far. The CLIC Chair can invite external experts to participate in CLIC meetings (without granting them membership). Members of the Board of Directors can also attend meetings of the CLIC. Traditionally, one of the Directors is delegated to serve as liaison between the Board and the Committee.

There are no formal requirements as to the level of expertise of CLIC experts, or as to their training. Despite this, the absence of candidates with legal training seems to be one possible reason why some CLARIN consortia are not represented in the CLIC. It should be emphasized that the CLIC is not a traditional legal "department" providing legal assistance but it is rather a legal competency centre interdisciplinarily integrating domains of legal and language research. Therefore, researchers whose background is not in law are also needed and valuable members. In practice, most CLIC members have long-standing experience in handling legal issues, acquired through management of language resources and tools. Some members of the CLIC are trained lawyers with experience in academia or in administration. The number of trained lawyers seems to have slowly but steadily increased since the establishment of the Committee, which is a very positive tendency, given the nature of the CLIC's missions. The CLIC is not intended to become a group composed exclusively of members with legal training, as this could move it far from the reality of language research and technology.

The CLIC Chair and Vice-Chair are appointed by the Board of Directors after consultation with the Committee, for two years. In practice, the Committee recommends the candidates in a vote, and the Board follows the recommendation. The same Chair and Vice-Chair can be appointed for more than one consecutive term; the bylaws do not limit the number of consecutive terms, but the practice seems to have limited it to two.

The CLIC meets at least once a year (often during the CLARIN Annual Conference). In practice, the Committee meets at least on a quarterly basis, and most of the meetings are virtual. Meetings are called by the Chair; at least three members of the CLIC may ask the Chair to call a meeting. Traditionally, CLIC meetings are open to non-members – physical meetings during the CLARIN Annual Conference can be attended by anyone, and the virtual meetings are announced on the CLARIN legal mailing list.

So far, the CLIC members have always been able to reach consensus on all debated matters, and there has been no need to vote. However, according to the by-laws, where consensus cannot be reached, the Committee should make decisions by simple majority vote, with casting vote held by the Chair.

Besides formal meetings, members of the CLIC are in regular contact via e-mail, usually in smaller groups, working on articles, updates of the CLIC materials or various other tasks. Apart from such informal subgroups, there is also a possibility to create formal subcommittees of at least three members, with the obligation to report on their activities to the Chair every year. Due to the relatively small and manageable size of the CLIC, and the fact that the Chair or Vice-Chair participate in every activity of the Committee, so far there has been no need to establish a formal subcommittee.

Neither membership nor chairmanship of the CLIC are remunerated, but they can be listed as contributions from national consortia to the CLARIN ERIC.

### **3.3 Mission and tasks**

The main mission of the CLIC, as per Article 1 of its by-laws, is to "advise the Board of Directors on all issues related to [Intellectual Property], privacy and data protection and ethical matters, as well as legal issues related to access and dissemination policies and their implementation". This mission is particularly important if one takes into consideration the fact that the legal portfolio (unlike some other portfolios, like User Involvement, which is attributed to a member of the Board of Directors and a thematic committee) has never been expressly attributed to any member of the Board of Directors, therefore it can be assumed that it falls within the many competences of the Executive Director, who is likely to need advice on legal matters. The scope of this mission is limited (for example, legal issues related to the establishment of new national consortia, or contractual relations between consortium partners, are not included), yet still very broad.

Firstly, it covers advice on all questions (also those unrelated to language resources) related to any form of intellectual property including, but not limited to, copyright, the *sui generis* database right, but also trade secrets, patents, and trademarks – areas that today remain underexplored by the CLIC and the language community in general, but which potentially may become important for the whole infrastructure.

Secondly, all questions related to privacy and data protection are also within the scope of the CLIC's mission. The distinction between privacy and data protection is fully justified, as privacy laws are not limited to data protection (privacy claims can be based on, e.g., tort law, criminal law, or specific grounds, such as Article 9 of the Napoleonic Code and the numerous legal norms that it inspired), and conversely data protection (i.e., a legal framework stemming mostly from the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive) does not only apply to the private sphere of individuals' life.

Thirdly, the CLIC also advises the Board on all legal issues "related to access and dissemination policies and their implementation". Therefore, when it comes to policies concerning access to and dissemination of language resources and tools, the CLIC is also competent to advise the BoD on issues that go beyond intellectual property, privacy and data protection, and include for example, contract law, administrative law (such as reuse of public sector information) and even criminal law (e.g., hate speech in language resources).

Fourthly, advice on "ethical matters" of all sorts is also within the scope of the CLIC's mission. This should be interpreted as analysing compliance with commonly recognized norms of general and scientific ethics. Purely ethical issues are rarely debated within the CLIC, as it seems that they are better handled at the national or even institutional level.

In order to fulfil its mission, CLIC by-laws attribute the following tasks to the Committee:

### **3.4 Communication channels**

The CLIC's tasks require regular communication within the Committee, as well as with other CLARIN bodies and the general public.

The most important communication channel within the CLIC are meetings – as stated above, there is one face-to-face meeting per year (unless, of course, travelling is made impossible, as it was during the Covid-19 pandemic), which is collocated with the CLARIN Annual Conference. The remaining meetings are virtual, using online communication technology. In between meetings, CLIC members usually work in smaller, task-oriented groups which communicate via e-mail or, occasionally, by videoconference.

The CLIC also communicates with the Board of Directors and the National Coordinators' Forum. The Board appoints a liaison who participates in CLIC's meetings. Once a year, the CLIC chair reports to the National Coordinator's Forum during one of their meetings. Communication with other CLARIN standing committees is less formalized; it normally takes place by e-mail (usually between chairs and/or co-chairs), but exceptionally also during face-to-face meetings.

The CLIC's primary channel for communicating with the general public is its dedicated webpage on the CLARIN ERIC's website,1 administrated by the CLARIN Office. It contains an up-to-date list of CLIC members, a description of its mission and tasks, links to the description of the CLARIN licensing framework, the Legal Information Platform, the latest CLIC White Paper, as well as the address of the legal mailing list.

The Legal Information Platform is part of the CLARIN website administered directly by the CLIC. It contains detailed explanations on copyright and related rights, licensing and data protection, written by Paweł Kamocki and Erik Ketzan

**<sup>1</sup>** https://www.clarin.eu/governance/legal-issues-committee

specifically with the CLARIN audience in mind. The platform also features a legal bibliography and links to useful online resources.

The mailing list<EMAIL_ADDRESS>is accessible to anyone, and is also used to communicate with all stakeholders within the CLARIN community and beyond. The CLIC also communicates its analyses to the general public via its White Paper Series, openly available online and licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license. The series was launched in 2014 on the initiative of Erik Ketzan, then the CLIC's vice-chair. The idea behind it was to present complex legal issues of fundamental importance for language science and language resources in a comprehensive yet concise form, approachable by language scientists with no legal training. The White Papers are not intended to reflect the official position of CLARIN ERIC, hence they do not use the CLARIN ERIC name or logo. In the future, the Board of Directors may intend to publish official statements on certain legal issues (such as future changes in EU law), in which case it will be the CLIC's role to provide the Board with advice.

On occasion, the CLIC, with financial and organizational assistance from the CLARIN Office, also organizes workshops and other events for other members of the CLARIN community or for the general public.

### **4 CLIC and the regulatory framework**

The EU regulatory framework concerning access to and reuse of language resources, especially for research purposes, has undergone substantial modifications since the establishment of CLARIN ERIC.

In 2012, when the CLIC was officially established, copyright exceptions for research in EU Member States were based on Article 5.3(a) of the Directive 2001/29/ CE on Copyright in the Information Society (InfoSoc). This exception, albeit quite broad, covers only non-commercial scientific research and teaching. Moreover, due to its non-mandatory character the exception was implemented very narrowly in most Member States, which made it quite incompatible with modern research practice, especially compared to the relative freedom offered by the fair use doctrine in the United States.

Shortly after the establishment of CLARIN ERIC, the first European countries adopted specific exceptions for text and data mining, still based on the same provision of the InfoSoc Directive, and therefore limited only to non-commercial scientific research. This was the case, for example, in the UK (in 2014), in France (in 2016), and in Germany (in 2017). In 2019, a mandatory exception for text and data mining for scientific research purposes was included in the Directive 2019/970 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM). The new exception seems satisfyingly broad in enabling research institutions to copy copyright-protected material for scientific research purposes; however, it does not in itself allow any sharing of the copies (although it can be combined, as in German national law, with the "general" research exception in the InfoSoc Directive, which allows limited sharing), and requires for the copies to be stored with appropriate level of security, which increases the role of specialized research data archives.

The 2019 DSM Directive also introduces other changes that are relevant for language resources, such as, for example, extended collective licensing, or facilitated access to out-of-print works. It had to be implemented in all EU Member States by 7 June 2021.

The adoption of the DSM Directive was not the only important development in the field of copyright law in recent years. For the language community, another noteworthy document is the 2012 Orphan Works Directive (2012/28/EU), allowing for certain uses of some copyright-protected works whose rightsholders cannot be identified or located despite diligent search.

Another branch of EU law that affects language research and that has been thoroughly reformed since the establishment of CLARIN ERIC is data protection law. The General Data Protection Regulation (EU Regulation 2016/679; GDPR), which replaced the 1995 Data Protection Directive (95/26/EC), was adopted in 2016 and entered into application in 2018. Although the GDPR is typically described as a product of an evolution rather than a revolution (indeed, most of the fundamental concepts from the 1995 Directive remain unchanged), it does introduce some important changes for research, emphasizes the importance of accountability and self-assessment (e.g., through records of data processing activities, or through Data Protection Impact Assessments), and substantially increases fines for non-compliance. GDPR-related best practices in research are still crystallizing today, as awareness of data protection issues is growing not only in the research community, but also among research funding organizations.

Besides copyright and data protection, other branches of law are becoming increasingly important for access to and reuse of language data for research purposes. This is the case, for example, with EU rules on the reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI); the 2003 PSI Directive (2003/98/EC) was first amended in 2013 (by the Directive 2013/37/EU), and then replaced by the 2019 Open Data Directive (2019/1024), which also covers research data resulting from public funding. The extended scope of PSI/Open Data regulation created new sources of freely (and legally) reusable language data.

In recent months, the European Commission has been very actively publishing new drafts (e.g., for the Data Governance Act, or the Artificial Intelligence Act) which, when adopted, may have considerable impact on the CLARIN infrastructure. Therefore, the European Union is not at the "end of history" when it comes to legal developments, and there will be no shortage of work for the CLIC in the years to come.

#### **4.1 CLIC's direct participation in the lawmaking process**

CLARIN ERIC, a representative of the language research community in the EU, is an important stakeholder in many EU law reforms. As such, it becomes actively involved in stakeholder consultations which are necessary part of a democratic lawmaking process. This involvement requires not only time and qualified effort, but also substantial funds, and therefore it must remain limited. It is also a particularly delicate task, given that CLARIN consortia are financed by national governments which may have conflicting interests and take different positions in negotiations over various law reforms.

One of the earliest and perhaps most prominent examples of such involvement is the participation of Erik Ketzan, then vice-chair of CLARIN ERIC, in the thematic group "Text and Data Mining for Scientific Research Purposes" within Stakeholders Dialogue "Licenses for Europe", organized by the European Commission in 2013.2 The goal of a long series of meetings (from February to December) was to find rapid, industry-led solutions to facilitate access to online content. Unfortunately, it was only very moderately successful, as most organizations representing the scientific research and open access publishing sectors withdrew from the process due to concerns about its scope, composition, and transparency.3 CLARIN ERIC was one of the few representatives of the scientific research sector who did not leave the negotiation table until the end. The outcome of the TDM thematic group was a joint statement of commitment by scientific publishers to a roadmap to enable TDM for non-commercial scientific research in the European Union.4 The roadmap envisioned by publishers was largely license- and subscription-based, and as such it was not widely acclaimed in the scientific research community. The apparent failure of the Stakeholders' Dialogue prompted the EU legislator to adopt a statutory exception for text and data mining for research purposes, which is currently part of the 2019 DSM Directive (Article 3).

Another example of CLARIN ERIC's (and the CLIC's) direct involvement in the lawmaking process is its admission, on the initiative of Ville Oksanen, as a

**<sup>2</sup>** https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/licences-europe-stakeholder-dialogue

**<sup>3</sup>** https://libereurope.eu/article/stakeholders-representing-the-research- sector-smes-and-openaccess-publishers-withdraw-from-licences-for-europe-2/

**<sup>4</sup>** http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?doc\_id=49203

Category C observer (*Other Regional Intergovernmental Organization*, which is a "high" category, given precedence over national governments) at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Established in 1967, WIPO is a specialized agency of the United Nations created to protect and promote intellectual property.

Participation in such endeavours is above all an opportunity to establish CLARIN as the representative of the language community in Europe, to accentuate its awareness of legal issues, and to liaise with other stakeholders with similar interests.

#### **4.2 CLIC's research articles and White Papers**

Writing research articles is a big part of CLIC's activity. For many years, the CLIC has been submitting a joint article (co-written by several CLIC members on the Chair's initiative) for the CLARIN Annual Conference, which often embraces a comparative approach to various legal issues affecting language science. Most of these articles deal primarily with the Regulatory Framework.

In 2015, an article by Aleksei Kelli, Kadri Vider, and Krister Lindén entitled "The Regulatory and Contractual Framework as an integral part of the CLARIN Infrastructure" (Kelli, Vider, and Lindén 2015) was accepted for the CLARIN conference in Wrocław. General in nature, the article provided a comprehensive overview of the legal framework applicable to language resources and introduced the concept of regulatory and contractual frameworks, which also serve as the backbone of this very chapter.

In 2018, a CLIC paper accepted for the CLARIN Annual Conference in Pisa (Kelli et al. 2019) examined the possibility of processing personal data without consent of the data subject for the development and use of language resources. The paper studied the implementation of research exceptions in various CLARIN countries, as well as the possibility to use alternative grounds (i.e., other than consent) for the processing of personal data for research purposes (such as public interest or legitimate interest).

In 2019, a CLIC paper accepted for the CLARIN Annual Conference in Leipzig (Kelli et al. 2020) explored the degree of legal control that copyright holders and data subjects can exercise over language models derived from "their" data.

CLIC White Paper #3, published in 2018 (Kamocki, Ketzan, and Wildgans 2018), was also devoted to a part of the Regulatory Framework, namely the GDPR. Over 25 pages long, the White Paper contains three parts. The first presents basic terminology and main principles of the Regulation, discusses the rights of data subjects and obligations of data controllers, and summarizes the principles related to cross-border transfers of personal data. The second part analyses research exemptions in the GDPR, while the third presents new opportunities for bottom-up standardization, namely Codes of Conduct and Data Protection Seals. As of November 2021, the CLIC works on an extensive set of around 30 handouts on various GDPR-related issues, which are intended to replace the White Paper.

The idea of a GDPR Code of Conduct, first launched by Kamocki et al. (2018) and likewise discussed in the above-mentioned White Paper, was heavily debated within the CLIC. GDPR Codes of Conduct, regulated in Article 40 of the GDPR, are sets of sector-specific rules intended to contribute to proper application of the GDPR; if a Code of Conduct is approved by a competent supervisory authority, and if an accredited body monitors compliance with the Code, the Code can effectively "supplant" the GDPR for every organization who adheres to it. One could imagine a GDPR Code of Conduct for processing personal data in language resources, monitored by CLARIN, as a mechanism to unify GDPR-related practices in the community, and significantly facilitate cross-border endeavours such as building a pan-European infrastructure for language resources.

However, it emerged from the discussions within the CLIC that such far-reaching measures may not be desirable, given that certain CLARIN centres have already adopted specific data processing policies. It became apparent that many GDPR-related issues remain divisive in Europe: for example, researchers in countries like Germany or Austria are very attached to consent as the legal basis for personal data processing, whereas researchers in other countries, like Finland, rely more on alternative grounds such as public interest. In this context, the CLIC's ambition should be to adopt guidelines in several specific areas of GDPR compliance, such as data anonymization or rights of data subject, rather than opting for an instrument aimed at full unification.

### **4.3 CLIC's events**

In recent years, the CLIC has also organized several events dedicated specifically to informing the language community about the relevant regulatory framework, and discussing legal challenges that language researchers have to face.

A workshop entitled "Hacking the GDPR to Conduct Research with Language Resources in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences", organized by the CLIC, hosted by CLARIN-LT, and supported by the CLARIN ERIC, took place in Vilnius on 7 December 2018.5 The event, which brought together around 25 participants, featured presentations by several members of the CLIC, as well as invited guests.

**<sup>5</sup>** https://www.clarin.eu/tags/clic

The use cases discussed during the event were focused on such GDPR-related concepts as suitable legal grounds for processing, data anonymization, pseudonymization, storage limitation, and appropriate safeguards.

A CLARIN café on the rights of data subjects in language resources, organized by the CLIC and supported by the TRIPLE project, took place on 30 March 2021.6 The two-hour event was attended by 50 participants from both the CLARIN community and the private sector. The presentations given by CLIC members discussed not only the content of the rights of data subjects, but also practical aspects of their exercise in the specific context of language resources.

Another CLARIN café organized by the CLIC, this time on Text and Data Mining exceptions in the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, took place on 28 October 2021. The event attracted 25 participants willing to learn; it will hopefully mark the beginning of a community-wide debate on the impact of the recent EU copyright reform on language resources and language technology.

### **4.4 LegalTech co-developed by the CLIC and ELDAH**

In 2020, three CLIC members (Vanessa Hannesschläger, Paweł Kamocki, and Walter Scholger), who are also members of the DARIAH ELDAH (Ethics and Legality in Digital Arts and Humanities) Working Group, teamed up to create the DARIAH ELDAH Consent Form Wizard.7 This online tool enables researchers to quickly generate a GDPR-compliant consent form for collecting personal data for research purposes, but which can also be used, for example, for creating mailing lists or organizing academic events. Currently the tool is available in English, German, Italian and Croatian, although there are plans to have it translated to other languages. The launch of the Consent Wizard was an opportunity for the CLIC to liaise more closely with ELDAH, and organize the first joint meeting of both groups in June 2021.

### **5 CLIC and the contractual framework**

The main role of the CLIC with regards to the contractual framework is to host and update the CLARIN license suite. It also prepared guidelines on the use of another popular license suite, Creative Commons 4.0, and two LegalTech tools intended to

**<sup>6</sup>** https://www.clarin.eu/blog/recap-clarin-cafe-rights-data-subjects-language-resources

**<sup>7</sup>** https://consent.dariah.eu/

assist researchers in the choice of an appropriate license for their tools and data. Recently, the CLIC has also started analysing other standard form contracts which govern access to and reuse of large quantities of language data, such as Terms of Service of popular social media services.

#### **5.1 The development of the CLARIN Licensing Framework**

At a meeting in Berlin in 2006, a handful of representatives of potential CLARIN members convened to prepare an EC-funded project application for the preparatory phase (PP) of CLARIN ERIC. Ideas were collected on what work package should be included and language technology and language resources were given favourites that every partner candidate was bidding for. However, Prof. Kimmo Koskenniemi from Finland insisted that legal and contractual issues also needed a work package, WP7. As no one else was eager to take on this task, it fell on Finland to carry out this part of the CLARIN PP project. The formation of the CLARIN ERIC statues had a separate work package WP8 and was carried out by Denmark under the direction of Prof. Bente Maegaard.

During the CLARIN preparatory phase project, two significant legal frameworks for the CLARIN operations were drawn up in WP7. The first framework was the CLARIN Service Provider Federation (SPF) which implemented the Single-Sign-On (SSO) principle on a large scale between the CLARIN consortium partners. It was a precursor to EduGain, although EduGain and EduRoam were already being developed at the time. The fact that one could use SSO – i.e., one's own university account and credentials – to sign in to various services was a key driving factor for the design of the second framework designed in WP7 (i.e., the licensing framework).

It was clear that open-source licensing and public licensing like Creative Commons (CC) were to be endorsed by CLARIN and named the PUB licensing category, but at the time CC was still in the process of establishing itself and most data was proprietary or had no clear license, having been painstakingly collected by individual researchers as, for example, manually transcribed and annotated letters, newspaper clips, or interviews, or just individual sentences from such sources. As many researchers had spent years, if not decades, of their life just collecting data, they were reluctant to give up such material to others, but some were willing to share on an individual basis. As mentioned, the datasets collected by researchers were also often personal data based on interviews, so the varying data protection legislations in the EU countries were an additional challenge. A restricted license category named RES was needed for such datasets. The idea

was that such resources should only be made available upon individual request and, if containing personal data, only for a limited time.

For political and practical reasons, the CLARIN PP Project Board thought that there should be some benefit to being an accredited researcher who was part of the CLARIN SPF, that is, the fact that a person already was an established researcher with credentials at a university should be recognized when accessing resources provided by CLARIN partners. For this reason, an academic license category was established called ACA. The nature of this category was intended as a public license to a limited public consisting of researchers, but therein lay a conundrum. Who was a legitimate researcher? Should only people from academia count or were people from industry acceptable as well (i.e., should the affiliation or the purpose limit access)? CLARIN opted for the practical solution: organizational status could be checked based on the login credentials. This provided a technological solution to the philosophical problem of restricting the category to academic researchers. Later, this seems to have caught on and will now be enshrined in the text and data mining exception in the DSM Directive, which grants a special status to research organizations, in particular by enabling them to store the copied data for verification purposes.

 They often had a technological background, where real data is measurement data produced by the research infrastructures themselves through measuring devices, and therefore having no copyright except for a potential *sui generis* database right on the data collection. In social sciences and humanities, interviews and questionnaires may be primary data, for which a license can be determined by the collector, but most data is secondary data, that is, it is used in research for some other purpose than it was originally created for by a human being imbuing it with either copyright or personal data rights.

Initially, the CLARIN categories were intended as metadata, that is, a way to inform the end user about the license to expect when accessing a resource. The idea was that licenses in a particular category had to provide at least a minimum number of rights to the end user, and at most some restrictions to qualify for the category. Originally this was intended only as a checklist to determine the category of the license. This is still visible in the CLARIN License Category Calculator. As Ville Oksanen had also been part of the origins of the Creative Commons (CC) movement, he adapted the CC categories. So as not to infringe on the CC look, it was decided that CLARIN would use a "+" (plus sign) as a connector between the subcategories where CC uses a "-" (hyphen) or a " " (space).

Based on an analysis of the manifold licensing conditions for resources in the Language Bank of Finland, Ville Oksanen devised a few more subcategories in addition to those in CC. With this initial analysis as a basis, the categories and subcategories were tested on a set of more than 800 existing licenses throughout Europe by the CLARIN partners in EU (Oksanen, Lindén, and Westerlund 2010). Based on the response and the clarifying requests, the leading questions currently visible in the category calculator were designed. However, researchers wanted practical advice on how to make new or unpublished resources available, so what were originally only intended as categories and example clauses for classifying existing agreements evolved into ready-made sample contracts called CLARIN license templates. The final stage of the CLARIN licensing category adoption was to include the categories in the VLO as originally intended, using the laundry symbols to offer visual guidance on the openness of a resource. For an example of the use of CLARIN license templates in a repository, see Andersen and Gammeltoft (2022).

The work with the Contractual Framework continues in the CLIC. The majority of CLIC members are involved (see Kelli et al. 2018), and currently there is a preliminary plan to restructure the contractual framework in view of the GDPR.

#### **5.2 CLIC's research articles and guidelines**

The Contractual Framework was the subject of several joint CLIC articles. Apart from being discussed in the foundational paper (mentioned in Section 3.3) by Aleksei Kelli, Kadri Vider, and Krister Lindén (2015), it was also thoroughly and critically analysed in an article by Kelli and others (2018), first presented at the 2017 CLARIN Annual Conference in Budapest. The paper, entitled "Implementation of an Open Science Policy in the context of management of CLARIN language resources: a need for changes?", discusses the utility of CLARIN ACA and RES categories, and the possibility of replacing them with other requirements.

Kelli et al. (2021) also discussed some aspects of the Contractual Framework in their paper accepted for the 2020 CLARIN Annual Conference, entitled "CLARIN Contractual Framework for sharing language data: The perspective of personal data protection". The paper provided a preliminary analytical background for redesigning the CLARIN contracts to bring them up to speed with the GDPR.

Finally, a paper by Kamocki et al. (2021) presented at the 2021 CLARIN Annual Conference analysed another aspect of the Contractual Framework affecting language resources, namely the terms and policies of Twitter, an important source of language data. There are plans to extend the scope of this analysis to include other popular social media services in the next CLIC White Paper.

The very first CLIC White Paper (Kamocki and Ketzan 2014) was also dedicated to the contractual framework, namely the Creative Commons 4.0 license suite; it was published in 2014, shortly after the launch of the latest version of Creative Commons licenses. Its intended purpose is to present the CC licenses and their building blocks to language researchers and discuss their utility for licensing language resources.

#### **5.3 LegalTech developed by the CLIC**

The first LegalTech tools created by the CLIC were developed to address the complexity of the contractual framework. The CLARIN License Category Calculator categorizes any resource license and aims at extracting an overview of the key licensing conditions, while the Public License Selector specializes in public licenses, guiding the user in choosing the best one for a particular purpose.

The CLARIN License Category Calculator8 guides a resource depositor when choosing a license category for a language resource. The CLARIN classification system for licenses has been devised for more efficient and transparent management of language resources by providing an at-a-glance overview of the main usage conditions of a language resource. Based on their licenses, language resources compatible with the CLARIN infrastructure can be divided into three main categories: CLARIN PUB, CLARIN ACA, or CLARIN RES. In addition, there are several subcategories based on the most common conditions of use associated with the distribution of language resources. The CLARIN License Category Calculator guides depositors of language resources in selecting the most fitting license category for their resource based on a series of choices they make relating to its contents and intended use(s). CLARIN deposition license agreements (made between resource providers and the CLARIN centres) are available for curating a minimal set of access conditions to include a resource in the CLARIN PUB, ACA, or RES categories. The minimal deposition licenses can be used as checklists if a CLARIN Centre wishes to use its own set of deposition licenses to agree on additional usage conditions with the resource provider.

The Public License Selector9 was created in 2015 by two CLIC members who also worked together on the EUDAT project: Paweł Kamocki and Pavel Straňák, assisted by software developer Michal Sedlák (Kamocki, Straňák, and Sedlák 2016; see also Hajič et al., 2022). A CLARIN mobility grant was allocated for Kamocki to travel to the Prague CLARIN Centre and finalize the tool. The Public License Selector is intended to assist a researcher in selecting a public license for his or

**<sup>8</sup>** https://www.clarin.eu/content/clarin-license-category-calculator

**<sup>9</sup>** https://github.com/ufal/public-license-selector

her datasets and tools. It covers popular data licenses (such as Creative Commons or Open Data Commons), as well as Free/Open Source Software licenses (GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, etc.). The user is asked a series of simple, usually "yes/no" questions, with the answers serving to narrow down the available set of compatible licenses. The Public License Selector itself is released under an open license and has been widely reused both within and outside of the CLARIN community.

### **6 Conclusion**

The Normative Layer of CLARIN is, alongside the organizational and the technical layers, an essential part of the infrastructure. It consists of the Regulatory Framework (statutory law, case law, authoritative guidelines, etc.) and the Contractual Framework (licenses, terms of service, etc.), and ethical norms. Navigating the normative layer requires expertise, experience, and qualified effort. In order to advise the Board of Directors, a standing committee dedicated to legal and ethical issues, the CLIC, was created.

Since its establishment in 2012, the CLIC has made considerable efforts to provide not only the BoD but also the general public with information and guidance. It has published many papers (both in proceedings of CLARIN conferences and in its own White Paper Series) and developed several LegalTech tools. It also runs a Legal Information Platform, where accessible information on various issues affecting language resources can be found.

Today, as CLARIN transitions from the development phase to the phase of sustainable functioning, the Normative Layer is changing dynamically, and continuous efforts from the CLIC are still needed to provide the Board of Directors and the whole community with information and guidance.

### **Bibliography**

Andersen, Gisle & Peder Gammeltoft. 2022. The role of CLARIN in advancing work in terminology: The case of Termportalen – the national terminology portal for Norway. In Darja Fišer and Andreas Witt (eds.), *CLARIN. The infrastructure for language resources.*  Berlin: De Gruyter.

Hajič, Jan, Eva Hajičová, Barbora Hladká, Jozef Mišutka, Ondřej Košarko & Pavel Straňák. 2022. LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ: Where we are and where we go. In Darja Fišer and Andreas Witt (eds.), *CLARIN. The infrastructure for language resources.* Berlin: De Gruyter.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. *Science* 162 (3859). 1243–1248.

Krister Lindén, Tommi Jauhiainen, Mietta Lennes, Mikko Kurimo, Aleksi Rossi, Tommi Kurki, and Olli Pitkänen

## **Donate Speech**

Collecting and Sharing a Large-Scale Speech Database for Social Sciences, Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Research and Innovation

**Abstract:** The Donate Speech campaign aimed to collect 10,000 hours of ordinary, casual Finnish speech to be used for studying language as well as for developing technology and services that can be readily used in the languages spoken in Finland. In this project, particular attention has been devoted to allowing for both academic and commercial use of the material. Even though this ambitious target currently seems likely to evade us, the Donate Speech campaign has managed to amass an extensive resource of more than 4,000 hours of Finnish colloquial speech comprising more than 220,000 speech recordings by more than 25,000 speakers from all over Finland in just a few months.

**Keywords:** speech resources, colloquial speech, large-scale data collection, academic and commercial use

**Acknowledgements:** We are grateful to the Vake Oy (currently Ilmastorahasto) for funding the initial survey and the development of the software platform for speech collection, to the national Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle for developing and advertising the collection campaign in national media, as well as to the Academy of Finland for funding the transcription of a substantial part of the speech data and the development of the framework to distribute the data through FIN-CLARIN and the Language Bank of Finland. In addition, we are grateful to researchers of the Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Turku, as well as the staff of Yle and Vake for generously contributing their time to the project.

**Krister Lindén,** University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>**Tommi Jauhiainen,** University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>**Mietta Lennes,** University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>**Mikko Kurimo,** Aalto University, Aalto, Finland, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>**Aleksi Rossi,** Yle – Finnish Broadcasting Company, Yleisradio, Finland, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
**Tommi Kurki,** University of Turku, Turku, Finland, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>**Olli Pitkänen,** 1001 Lakes Oy, Helsinki, Finland, e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
### **1 Introduction**

There are already several commercial systems utilizing AI with Finnish speech recognition in production use, but many more use cases are waiting to be successfully commercialized. To some extent this may be due to the fact that the demand for and supply of language resources do not always align, but the consensus of opinion among experts is that openly available large language resources will further accelerate the development and implementation of various language-based AI applications. Openly available speech processing components make it possible for many different actors wishing to test service ideas to pilot high-level services, while leaving the final decision on what technology to use in the production phase to a later stage. For example, automatic speech recognition (speech-to-text) and speech synthesis (text-to-speech) in Finnish have been available on a few devices and applications for several years (e.g., as speech capabilities in Apple and Google products), but many end-user services require better and more reliable processing support for colloquial Finnish.

A worldwide effort by the Mozilla Common Voice project1 is ongoing, but their aim is to collect speech that has been read aloud. From previous projects, we know that prompted speech tends to bring people to use standardized and non-colloquial speech, and we specifically wanted everyday spontaneous speech from a large number of speakers.

In the remainder of Section 1, we will describe the process that led to the point where Vake, the Finnish State Development company (currently Ilmastorahasto Oy) was able to make the decision to fund the speech data collection campaign. We also offer a glimpse of the history of the Language Bank of Finland to explain why it was chosen as the distributor of the data, what speech material had previously been collected, why we still decided that we needed to collect new speech material for modern colloquial speech, and how CLARIN has prepared for the distribution of such large personal data collections.

The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows: in Section 2, we get an overview of a similar project (with a purely academic goal) which gave us valuable previous experience. In Section 3, we learn how the Finnish national broadcasting company Yle designed the media campaign to get people to donate speech. In Section 4, we describe the legal framework for collecting the data so that it can be reused by academia and industry alike. In Section 5, we take a look at the technical implementation and where to find the software for the speech collection platform. In Section 6, we overview the data we were able to collect,

**<sup>1</sup>** https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/

and in Sections 7 and 8, we draw some conclusions and acknowledge the funders and the organizations who contributed to the implementation and running of the campaign.

#### **1.1 The need for speech corpora**

At the beginning of the 21st century, the efforts and resources of Finnish speech technology and spoken language research were scattered all over Finland and represented by relatively small teams. The USIX – Uusi käyttäjäkeskeinen tietotekniikka [New User-Centric Information Technology] technology programme was launched in 1999 and funded by the Finnish Technology Agency (Tekes, currently Business Finland). The programme, resulting in new projects and cooperation between research teams, boosted research in Finnish speech and language technology. With funding from the Ministry of Education, a survey on the state of the art of speech and spoken language research in Finland was published in 2001 (Toivanen and Miettinen 2001). One of the key findings of the survey was that investments in the availability of digital speech data were required to boost the development of research and technology in Finnish speech processing.

The availability of speech data is a prerequisite for both research in spoken language and the development of speech technological applications, including speech interfaces. The consortium project *Integrated Resources for Speech Technology and Spoken Language Research in Finland (SA-Puhe)*, funded by the Academy of Finland in 2003–2004, aimed to tackle the need for general guidelines and methods for researchers to collaboratively collect, annotate, and share speech corpora. During the project, phoneticians and language researchers at the University of Helsinki worked together with the Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing at Helsinki University of Technology and CSC – IT Center for Science.

The SA-Puhe project made a big effort to address the need for a centralized infrastructure in storing, sharing, and maintaining both speech data and the related annotations for research purposes. The platform was to be built on an object-oriented database system called QuickSig, which had been developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, including some further collaboration with the University of Helsinki, during the 1990s (Karjalainen and Altosaar 1993; Altosaar, Millar, and Vainio 1999). The database system was to provide efficient queries and access via a graphical query formation compiler (Altosaar and Lennes 2005). In order for researchers to be able to contribute, share, and maintain their transcripts and structured annotations for the speech recordings, the

first version of a collaborative annotation editor (Puh-Editor) was developed at CSC – IT Center for Science (Grönroos and Miettinen 2004).

Unfortunately, it was not possible to complete the integration of the components of the speech database platform during the funding period. Due to the lack of resources for further development and maintenance, the Puh-Editor software was discontinued after a couple of years in test use, and the database system remained a local development project. During the project, general speech annotation guidelines were developed with the help of the language researcher community (Lennes and Ahjoniemi 2005). These guidelines proved to be useful when the idea of big data for speech processing was revived inspired by recent progress in speech technology due to neural network technology.

The process that led to the launch of the *Donate Speech* campaign began with the meetings of an ad hoc group of companies and public organizations during 2018. In spring 2019, Vake commissioned a preliminary study for the needs of Finnish language resources for artificial intelligence from FIN-CLARIN and the Language Bank of Finland (Kielipankki).2 The goal was to specify interventions that would enable wide usability of the languages spoken in Finland in various AI applications, beginning with Finnish as the most widely spoken language in Finland. The Language Bank collected opinions and conducted interviews with more than 50 commercial and public organizations in Finland. One of the eight identified development targets was a large corpus of spontaneous colloquial speech, as identified in the study published in October 2019.3

FIN-CLARIN, through the Language Bank of Finland, cooperated with the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) and the Finnish State Development Company (Vake Oy, currently Ilmastorahasto Oy) in the Donate Speech campaign (Lahjoita puhetta). Experts from the University of Helsinki, Aalto University, and the University of Turku also participated in the project. Vake assigned the data protection analysis and the drafting of legal documents to 1001 Lakes Oy, and legal counsels from the University of Helsinki and from Yle participated in developing the legal framework of the collection campaign.

**<sup>2</sup>** The FIN-CLARIN consortium (www.helsinki.fi/finclarin) is led by the University of Helsinki and the main service centre of FIN-CLARIN is the Language Bank (www.kielipankki.fi).

**<sup>3</sup>** https://vake.fi/wp-content/uploads/Vaken-suomenkielisen-tekoälyn-kehittämisohjelma-Esiselvitys-2019.pdf

### **1.2 FIN-CLARIN and the Language Bank of Finland**

Since 2009, FIN-CLARIN has been on the national research infrastructures roadmap maintained by the Academy of Finland. The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of all Finnish universities engaged in linguistic and language technology research,4 the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus),5 and CSC – IT Center for Science.6 FIN-CLARIN maintains the Language Bank of Finland,7 through which the members of the consortium make available various language resources, both corpora and tools.

From the beginnings of the Language Bank in 1996, the aim has been that both corpora and tools are made available to the research community in the most efficient way possible. Because little attention has been paid to making materials and tools available to companies, many language resources are licensed specifically with a non-commercial restriction. In many cases, copyright or data protection issues have also led to restricted licenses. In FIN-CLARIN, CSC is responsible for the technical maintenance and the University of Helsinki for the acquisition and curating of corpora and tools.

### **1.3 Potential applications for special needs**

Searching speech recordings for content is error-prone, even if word-spotting techniques are available for locating likely speech segments. Another approach is to convert speech into textual transcripts and use existing tools for text analysis. One may wish to count how many recorded telephone calls mention certain issues in a robocall survey. Examples of more complex use cases are various analyses of telephone discussions and their post-processing solutions. Another application is the automatic transliteration of interviews conducted by journalists or researchers. Quickly finding a quote from the speech signal would considerably speed up the verification of the details of such interviews. Improving the searchability of speech recordings also improves the usability of video-recorded debates for later verification, for example, the debates associated with decisions made in the plenary of the Parliament.

**<sup>4</sup>** The Aalto University and the universities of Eastern Finland, Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Oulu, Tampere, Turku, and Vaasa.

**<sup>5</sup>** https://www.kotus.fi

**<sup>6</sup>** https://www.csc.fi

**<sup>7</sup>** https://www.kielipankki.fi/language-bank/

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is frequently needed and used for traditional text dictation, for instance for drafting messages in situations where hands and eyes have other duties. Dictation that adapts to the speech of a single person already works reasonably well in Finnish, for example on mobile devices, especially in conditions where the amount of background noise is low and/or the speaker is close to the microphone.

With improved speech processing, television shows, lectures, and so on can be subtitled automatically, either directly from the original audio or from the dictation of a human subtitler. Special groups such as the hard of hearing would benefit greatly from near-real-time subtitling of speech. Reliably functioning, genre-independent subtitling of Finnish speech would also provide a basis for automatic translation and interpretation, which has innumerable uses in the globalizing world.

Society currently requires a number of digital user skills, such as the utilization of mobile devices. If a user's vision is impaired or their finger dexterity is insufficient for a device, a user may currently be excluded from many services. Often, however, these requirements can be bypassed with a voice-enabled user interface to services in the user's native language. For the elderly and disabled, intelligent applications may complement or even replace personal services and provide an opportunity to live independently while improving the quality of life. On the other hand, if a voice interface exists but works poorly, it creates distrust and the users may avoid using a service. In some cases, such as healthcare services, user interface deficiencies may also pose security risks.

In language learning applications, speech interfaces that adapt to specific users are more useful. Interactional and oral skills are often emphasized in today's society and working life, and they are becoming an increasingly important part of language learning. For immigrants in Finland, having good oral skills in Finnish can be a great advantage in the job market and in building their social networks. A large database of transcribed colloquial speech with known topics is a good reference point, but other types of data are also needed to reliably measure pronunciation features in the speech of individual language learners and to model their speech and communicative activities in real interactional situations.

There are use cases where the speech to be analysed does not need to be presented in textual form but the analysis can be inferred directly from the speech. Such functionalities are, for example, automatic speaker identification or the automated analysis of a user's age, state of alertness, or health. The latter are useful for customizing applications and various services provided to the user, even if the accuracy is less than 100%. Even when such applications do not require the speech to be presented in textual form, they require large training corpora of speech data annotated with personal and health-related features.

#### **1.4 Speech data for commercial use**

Transcribing speech into text is a subjective process. A transcript is produced for a particular purpose and it reflects the choices made by an individual annotator. Regardless of the selected transcription system, a written transcript is unable to reflect all features that are relevant to natural interaction and the meaning of speech. These include momentary variations in the production of speech sounds or other noises, as well as longer-term prosodic properties, for example, voice quality, pitch, intensity, speech rate, and pauses. These features contribute not only to the impressions of melody, accents, and rhythm but also to the perceived meanings, intentions, and attitudes that we hear and understand in each other's speech as well as gestures, expressions, gazes, and other activities related to the interaction situation and context. The primary objective for the transcription of the collected Donate Speech data is to provide a phonematically accurate transcription of the sounds in the signal that will later be mapped to standardized speech for searchability and for enabling further language processing research and development.

The construction of secure, privacy-friendly voice user interfaces may in some cases require that the components of an application can be used without the transfer of personal data from one service to another, to a third party, or to another state. These factors argue for the fact that the speech processing components should be openly accessible and open source.

Speech corpora previously distributed by the Language Bank of Finland, such as the "Plenary Sessions of the Parliament of Finland, Downloadable Version 1" containing recordings of Parliamentary Plenary Sessions from 10 September 2008 to 1 July 2016, as well as their transcripts, are licensed CC-BY-NC-ND. Here NC is an abbreviation for *non-commercial*, that is, the materials may not be used for commercial purposes. Renegotiating licenses for this and other similar corpora to allow business use is another way to add commercially usable speech material. While in the case of the Plenary Sessions of the Parliament it may still be possible, it is often not feasible to renegotiate access rights to speech material after it has been collected and licensed. For this reason, it was particularly important to make sure new speech material was collected in a targeted manner, specifically including the possibility of commercial use.

#### **1.5 Legal considerations for sharing data within CLARIN**

The legal framework in the EU is intended to provide an interoperable space for various activities. While the legal framework harmonizes many of the activities

in other parts of society, the research arena has at times been left for national consideration. This affects the sharing of research data and resources that can be achieved through a research infrastructure like CLARIN as we need to find common legal ground that is applicable to research in all EU countries. In addition, research is not only limited to academia, so to share resources within a country, we often need solutions that apply to industry as well.

The intellectual property aspect of the legal space has been extensively discussed in (Kelli, Lindén, Vider 2016; Kelli, Mets, Vider, et al. 2018; Kelli, Tavast, Lindén, et al. 2019) by members of the CLARIN Legal Issues Committee. CLARIN recommends using Creative Common licenses whenever possible (Oksanen and Lindén 2011). For all datasets, including those that cannot be made openly available, CLARIN offers a legal metadata classification system (Oksanen, Lindén, and Westerlund 2010) to inform the users of potential restrictions that they need to be aware of when accessing a dataset. For datasets that cannot be made openly and publicly available, CLARIN also offers standard license templates for depositing data to be shared through CLARIN Centres (Kelli, Lindén, Vider, et al. 2018). The IPR relevant for sharing research data has been extensively scrutinized by CLARIN over the last ten years, which is documented in Kamocki, Kelli, and Lindén (2022) Section 3.5 of this book, and we are eagerly awaiting new opportunities provided by the EU text and data mining directive (Kelli, Tavast, Lindén, Vider, et al. 2020).

During the last few years, the consequences of EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been widely recognized (Kelli et al. 2021). Some leeway was given to individual EU member countries to implement exceptions for research, and this has led to differing practices for sharing personal data for academic research purposes (Kelli, Lindén, Vider, et al. 2019; Lindén et al. 2020). Resources containing personal data are among the resources that cannot be made available without protective measures, and CLARIN is in the process of updating its license templates to reflect how personal data can still be shared in safe and controlled ways for academic research (Kelli, Lindén, Vider, et al. 2020).

Despite the fact that not all data can be made openly accessible, it is possible to use data to which one has legal access for creating openly accessible language models. For a detailed discussion of this, see Kelli, Tavast, Lindén, Bristonas, et al. (2020). To illustrate how personal data can be collected and shared within the EU, we will present the legal underpinnings of the Donate Speech campaign in Section 4. The campaign involved more than 25,000 citizens in Finland donating more than 220,000 speech samples comprising roughly 4,000 hours of colloquial speech to be used by academia and industry for developing and researching language and AI applications. The fact that the data was collected to be used by industry as well makes it particularly relevant for CLARIN as industry use is regulated by the common EU ground in the GDPR.

### **2 Earlier speech collections in Finland**

In Finland, there are several extensive speech databases previously collected for linguistic research by the Institute for the Languages of Finland, the universities, and memory organizations, but for commercial purposes access to them is limited. In addition, plenty of linguistic research has been done, over a long period, from the perspective of dialectology, sociolinguistics, and interactional linguistics, and there are exceptionally extensive dialectological corpora (most of them representing the regional variation of Finnish in the 1960s and 1970s) and large sociolinguistic corpora representing social variation on the segmental levels of Finnish. However, a new extensive speech database representing largescale regional and social variation in contemporary Finnish is potentially a valuable new asset also in linguistics. Collecting dialectological and sociolinguistic speech data has typically been done through fieldwork and face-to-face interaction. Due to this aspect, compiling such a database has typically required vast resources of time and funding.

The Donate Speech Campaign is associated, on the one hand, with dialectology and sociolinguistics and their long traditions in obtaining data by doing extensive fieldwork, and on the other hand with phonetics and speech technology, which obtain data in laboratory settings. Both fields are largely empirical in practice. As dialectology and sociolinguistics aim for naturalness, with a focus on conversational speech and representativeness of speakers within communities, phonetics holds the replicability of experiments in high esteem and focuses on speech in laboratory settings (Thomas 2013: 108). In this project, collecting speech data over the internet needed to strike a balance between the two and at the same time take into account the possibilities and limitations of the digital environment.

Collecting speech data over the internet is a faster and more economic method than traditional fieldwork, and it makes it possible to reach a large number of potential participants who would not necessarily otherwise participate. Meanwhile, several questions arise: how can we collect controlled data with elicited tasks that represent speech as naturally or as spontaneously as possible and cover current regional and social variation as widely as possible? How can we obtain a large database that also represents functionally different speech samples (statements, commands, questions, echo questions, etc.)? A dialectologist or sociolinguist seeks ways to grasp the variation of language, and in practice will inevitably face the observer's paradox as Labov (1972: 209) has phrased it: "the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain these data by systematic observation."

Whether a scholar records an interview or a conversation in which informants are involved or an informant makes a recording alone – in other words, whether the scholar collecting data is present or not – Labov's paradox holds. The same paradox applies to data collection over the internet, especially when the goal of the campaign is not to collect read speech data. When interacting with a computer instead of another human being, how can we overcome the potential distraction that participants are self-consciously aware that they are recorded and, due to this, carefully watch their language use?

#### **2.1 Previous lessons from the Prosovar project**

The Donate Speech campaign had a Finnish predecessor that incorporated new methodology and new ways of obtaining speech data over the internet, implementing a crowdsourcing approach. The multidisciplinary project *The Regional and Social Variation of Finnish Prosody* (Prosovar) was conducted by the University of Turku and financed by the Kone foundation (2013–2015; see also Kurki et al. 2014; Nieminen and Kurki 2017). The objectives of this project included (a) the formation of a speech corpus particularly for the study of Finnish prosody and its regional and social variation (The Corpus of Prosodic Variation in Finnish) and (b) the development and testing of a method for data collection and analysis for the study of natural spoken language.

As a complement to old fieldwork for obtaining speech in dialectology and sociolinguistics, a new, partially crowdsourced method for collecting sociolinguistic and sociophonetic data via the internet was developed and tested in the Prosovar project. There was also a precedent for collecting sociolinguistic data on the internet (in particular, Dialect Topography by Professor J. K. Chambers; cf. Chambers 1994), but to our knowledge, Prosovar was one of the first attempts in dialectology, sociolinguistics, and sociophonetics (cf. computational linguistics; e.g., Lane et al. 2010; McGraw 2013) to collect speech data over the internet. The development of data collection methods in Prosovar required a multidisciplinary approach, where dialectological, sociolinguistic, (socio)phonetic, computer science, and Finnish language expertise was needed.

The idea was to motivate non-linguists to participate in data collection by completing recording tasks with a web application created for the Prosovar project. From the beginning of the project, it was crucially important to find ways to attract voluntary participants willing to record their speech samples for linguistic research purposes. The goal of giving public presentations, interviews to newspapers, and campaigning in social media was to arouse public interest. The possibility of listening to anonymous speech samples from other participants and implementing the elements of a game-like design in developing the application were also found to be good ways to attract interest.

Participants were able to make recordings with their personal computers, (Android) tablet computers, and (Android) cellular phones, as long as their device had a microphone and they created a user account. At the same time, this presented a way for them to further participate in the research; as long as they made recordings for the database, they were allowed to listen to randomly selected anonymous voice clips from the database and evaluate them in a folk linguistic manner. For example, a participant was asked to listen to a clip and locate the speaker's dialect on a map, or he/she was asked to describe, using a few adjectives, what the speaker in a clip sounded like. This information was and is possible to investigate from a folk linguistic perspective by analysing the language with regard to respondents and from a computer science perspective by applying dialect recognition techniques (e.g., how humans and computers perceive sounds differently).

Unregistered guest users were only able to listen to a few selected anonymous samples and obtain general information about Finnish colloquial speech and dialect samples in the data obtained so far in the project. In order to access the recording tasks and the "game", in which one listened to short audio clips and tried to locate their speakers, one had to (1) create a user account, (2) accept the conditions and terms of use, and (3) finish at least one recording task in order to access the game. All the data and the background information about the participants were moved to a separate server for privacy and security reasons. By the end of November 2015, there were approximately 1,000 registered users, of whom 395 had made recordings for the project, producing a total of over 9,300 recorded samples.

Inventing and designing suitable elicitation tasks was of crucial importance to the Prosovar project (see also Nieminen and Kurki 2015; Nieminen and Kurki 2017). The objective was to obtain comparable utterances, that is, the same thing in different dialects. In the very first tasks designed for the pilot stage, the participants were just prompted to read out loud the text on a screen; consecutive sentences of the same paragraph one by one, or simply disjointed phrases without any further context. Soon, it became clear that this might lead participants to use standard Finnish and thus obfuscate regional and social variation. The shorter the task and the more time for a participant to react, the more likely it was – at least for some informants – to become notably aware of their own language use; this was not ideal, since the idea was to collect spontaneous verbal reactions and not performances consciously planned to be recorded.

Due to this, tweaks were made to the old tasks and new tasks were designed. For instance, the same phrase was shown in two or three distinct dialects at the same time on a screen and participants were asked to consider how they would express the same phrase in their own way. In another task, a participant was told to list months and weekdays. In addition, tasks with visual, auditory, or audiovisual stimuli were devised. It still seemed that in tasks with textual stimuli, participants paid close attention to their language. Especially if the time to react to a stimulus was unlimited, some participants consciously paid attention to their language use, and as a consequence tended to either exaggerate dialectal forms or strive for perfection speaking in a very standard Finnish manner.

In the end, it was best to have various tasks with different stimuli; in most cases, the task instructions or cues were kept out of the way as much as possible while ensuring decent predictability in what the informant would ultimately say. Thus, the participants were required to react to assignments of various kinds. For instance, there was a task where the participants were shown two pictures with minor differences; their task was to spot the differences and report them verbally. In another task, the participant was shown a map of a fictional town and asked to guide a stranger from one point to another. In some tasks, participants were instructed to speak simultaneously when they saw a stimulus or when they were watching it. For instance, participants were shown a short animated video and, instead of watching it first and then summarizing the plot of the video, they were asked to describe and explain what was happening in the video.

Obtaining functionally different speech samples was one of the most challenging parts in creating the Prosovar database. It was much easier to develop tasks that reached narratives and even declaratives than interrogatives. Some sound samples of tasks in which a participant was asking questions without an actual interlocutor in the scene appeared awkward or unnatural. To mitigate this, tasks were created in which the research group tried to create an illusion of mutual interaction. For instance, there was a setting for social interaction in a marketplace where the participant was instructed to either buy berries from a salesman or to sell berries to a client, while the other party's line was provided by a pre-recorded sound sample on the site. This solution helped to construct a substantially more vivid setting; inevitably, however, it was only slightly reminiscent of actual human interaction. A more functional solution would presumably have been to have two or more participants online simultaneously in the same recording task. In addition to the limited technical resources at the time in the Prosovar project, as well as the risk of data abuse or pestering of other participants prevented the implementation of this collaborative type of task.

Previous experiences in collecting speech data over the internet also showed that sound quality has to be taken into consideration. In the Prosovar project, there was a need to find a balance between catching as many potential participants as possible and setting the system requirements for the devices of potential participants. Overly sophisticated system requirements would have decreased the number of potential users. For the same reason, it was decided that collecting data would be carried out without asking the potential participants to install any application on their device. Because of this, the minimum requirement for a device was basically a microphone (built-in or external). Since the recordings were fully carried out by the participants, it was not possible to control the recording settings. Participants had a varying range of computers with varying quality of sound equipment. The website provided information on how to use the mixer and how to ensure eligible recording conditions, but few participants seem to have made use of them.

This tended to leave the Prosovar research group at the mercy of the web browsers and their plug-ins and add-ons. As a consequence, the quality of speech data was very variable. Still, the majority of the samples were actually of good enough quality as the objective in Prosovar was to study the prosodic features of speech, which are generally more robust than the spectral features.

### **3 Designing the Donate Speech campaign**

This section describes the process that was used to design and launch the Donate Speech campaign. The initial objective of the Donate Speech campaign was to collect data for all languages spoken in Finland. However, the first phase of the campaign focused on Finnish with the objective to obtain 10,000 hours of colloquial Finnish representing the wide variety of ways the Finns currently speak it in everyday settings. The data is intended for linguistic research and development of technology for both academic and commercial purposes. We also describe what kind of meta-information was collected from the participants and how.

The goal of the campaign was not merely to collect a vast amount of any kind of speech, but to reach out to as many different groups of Finnish speakers and to as many individuals as possible. In marketing the campaign to citizens, it was emphasized that all variants of spoken Finnish are welcome, including speech from second-language Finnish learners. However, in order to understand the privacy notice and the instructions, a certain level of language proficiency was required from the speech donors.

In order to strike a balance between the material goals, the technical possibilities, and the resources that were available, design workshops were organized for all interested parties. During these events, general ideas were collected from both industry and academia on the different uses for the collected speech, while most of the planning of the thematic tasks to elicit speech was left to the staff of the national broadcasting company Yle with advice collected from previous efforts like the Prosovar project. Yle was in charge of the public outreach through its radio and TV channels. Yle designed pictures, videos, and texts that were presented to speakers in the web application and the downloadable apps. A number of technical templates were designed to allow the design of themes with various types of content in order to target a desired speaker group.

The workshops to determine potential use cases, target audiences, and required and optional features were conducted in autumn 2019 with key research stakeholders, following up during spring 2020. The workshops were facilitated by the solution developer company Solita and were loosely based on the Design Thinking methodology. Later a series of key features were also tested with quick paper prototypes, and in succession with semi-interactive tools. A multitude of design suggestions were made by professional service designers guided by their experience, and a few crucial ones were also tested in practice.

Key issues and challenges for the design of the user interface were in determining elicitation methods that entice a person to speak freely, gaining the trust of the speaker, making him feel comfortable while also satisfying legal constraints for presenting enough required information in an easy-to-understand format, as well as more technical choices of supported platforms, presentation forms, visual and auditory feedback of the ongoing recording or its quality. After some ideas for themes had been formulated and tested, Yle settled on the fail-safe recurring functions of showing a video, a picture, or some textual content, enticing a person to speak with a single, easy-to-use button for starting and stopping the recording.

There were a number of discussions about whether and how to introduce gamification elements similar to the ones suggested by the Prosovar project, such as telling the user how much he had donated, or elements like scoreboards to compare results and maintain user interest, or social elements like sharing results or collecting teams. Eventually, only the amount of total time donated was included as a gamification element, leaving room for further improvements.

The opening theme *Harjoitellaan ensin* (Let's practice) started by test-driving the recording with the user, and assuring them that mainly AI researchers would use the recordings and reminding them about the privacy notice. The technical platform also presented metadata questions for the user to answer, for example about dialect background (the location of the phone is neither queried nor transmitted), basic demographics like age group, gender, mother tongue, the current county a person lives in or was born in, and their profession and education level. In addition, the technical platform was also collected for statistical purposes.

In the end, Yle developed around 40 rather straightforward themes for stimulating the collecting of speech data. In addition to the opening practice theme, the 12 most popular themes, through which almost half of the data was collected, were: *Rakkain eläimeni* (My dearest pet), *Mistä kodikkuus syntyy?* (What makes a cozy home?), *Tärkeä esineeni* (An important object of mine), *Lempivaate* (My favourite piece of clothing), *Mikä suututtaa?* (What's infuriating?), *Turhat tavarani* (My superfluous things), *Mitä opimme?* (What did we learn?), *Entisajan lemmikit* (Old time pets), *Katson ikkunasta* (While I am looking out the window), *Kuva-arvoitus* (Picture riddle), *Kerro aamiaisesta* (What was your breakfast like?).

As part of the campaign, Yle made comical infomercials with requests to the general public to donate speech. These were broadcast during programme breaks in national radio and TV channels during the summer and autumn of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, with some trailing reruns during spring 2021.

### **4 Legal aspects**

From the beginning, it was clear that the processing of data must be conducted in a legally and ethically sound way. All the central actors in the project – Kielipankki at the University of Helsinki, Vake, and Yle – are public organizations that cannot ignore these aspects.

The speech material donated during the campaign will be stored in the Language Bank of Finland (Kielipankki), coordinated by the University of Helsinki. It was noted that the material may contain subject matter protected by several legal rights (Alen-Savikko and Pitkänen 2016), such as:

In particular, the personal data protected by European and national data protection legislation, most notably by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),8 is considered to be essential from the campaign's viewpoint. The definition of the personal data is very broad and therefore significant parts of the speech material can be considered personal data for various reasons:

 – metadata about the speaker, his or her identification, name, etc., can be linked directly to a person.

**<sup>8</sup>** Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016.

According to the GDPR, it is important, inter alia:

These requirements were taken very seriously from the beginning.

The speech material can be shared with individual researchers, universities and research organizations or private companies that need it for studying language or artificial intelligence, for developing AI solutions, or for higher education purposes related to the aforementioned areas. During and after the campaign, the privacy practices of the Language Bank of Finland have been developed in accordance with the GDPR.

According to the GDPR, personal data shall be collected for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes.9 Therefore, it was essential to define the purpose as clearly as possible. In general, it is very difficult to avoid some vagueness when trying to define forthcoming undertakings. However, the following definition is as accurate and comprehensible as it was possible to come up with: "Personal data is processed for the development and research of applications and services that understand and produce speech, as well as for language research and higher education related to these purposes."

According to GDPR Article 6, the processing of personal data is lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the lawful bases applies:

**<sup>9</sup>** GDPR Article 5(1)(b).

In this case, there is no legal obligation or vital interest to collect speech. Public interest could be applicable to scientific research, but it is too restrictive considering that the material should also benefit commercial product development. To use a contract as a legal basis would require that processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party. That was not the case. In principle, it would have been possible to use consent as the legal basis, but that was considered impractical, because the consent must be specific and the data subjects have the right to withdraw their consents at any time.

Therefore, legitimate interest to collect and process speech to be used for studying language as well as for developing technology and services that can be readily used in the languages spoken in Finland was chosen to be the best basis for the processing of personal data in the campaign. However, it was recognized that if it becomes necessary to also process special categories of personal data, like racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, data concerning health, or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation, the explicit consent to the processing of such personal data is needed in accordance with GDPR Article 9. Until then, the controllers strive not to collect and process any personal data in these special categories.

To inform the data subjects (i.e., the individuals who donate their speech to the campaign), two essential documents were drafted:10

**<sup>10</sup>** https://lahjoitapuhetta.fi/

speech from the campaign. Furthermore, it attempts to fulfil the data subject's right to be informed, as prescribed in the GDPR, Articles 12 and 13. The controllers (University of Helsinki, Yle, and Vake) are identified, their contact information and the contact details of their data protection officers are disclosed, and the controllers' responsibilities specified; the purpose of the processing of personal data is explained, the legitimate interest as the lawful basis of processing is specified and justified, the categories of personal data are listed, the principles to whom the personal data can be transferred are stated, and it is explained for how long the data is stored. The data subject's applicable rights are explained: the right to be informed and to get access to data, the right to request rectification or erasure of personal data or restriction of processing concerning the data subject and to object to processing, and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. It is also noted that personal data is not used for automatic decision-making nor for direct marketing.

In order to use legitimate interest as the lawful basis for the processing of personal data, it was necessary to accomplish a balance test to ensure that the legitimate interests are not overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject. The Finnish Data Protection Authority has published a model balance test, which was carefully applied. The model consists of six steps:

To better understand the risks and possible problems that the processing of personal data may cause to individuals, a careful risk assessment was also performed. After completing all six steps, it seemed clear that a legitimate interest existed, met the legal requirements, and was not overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject.

It was also considered that the risks to the rights and freedoms of natural persons were not very high. However, just to be sure, it was decided, in accordance with GDPR Article 35, to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) as well. The above-mentioned balance test to ensure that the legitimate interests are not overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject – especially when complemented with a significant risk assessment – is not very different from a data protection impact assessment. Therefore, it was possible to reuse most of the balance test in the DPIA and only complement it as required by the GDPR.

#### **4.1 Data protection impact assessment**

A data protection impact assessment (DPIA) was carried out because of possible risks related to the processing of data. In particular, the extensive processing as well as the new technologies and innovation development related to the purpose of processing were taken into account.11 The University of Helsinki and Yle have data protection officers and they were involved in the data protection impact assessment as required by the GDPR.12

In the DPIA, the processing of personal data in the campaign was described in line with the discussion above. The purpose of the processing was described, the controllers and their responsibilities were specified, and the subcontractors were listed. It was explained who may receive the data, and it was noted that they can be located outside the European Union and the European Economic Area. The different phases of the processing were described, and the data that was to be processed, the sources of the data, and the purpose of processing were defined. The assessment of the necessity and proportionality of the processing operations in relation to the purposes was included. An essential part of the DPIA was the listing and the analyses of the recognized risks to the rights and freedoms of data subjects.13

The outcome of the DPIA was that the processing does not result in a high risk after the measures taken by the controllers to mitigate the risks. The DPIA will be updated as needed, if for example processing of special categories of personal data becomes necessary.

#### **4.2 Communicating the data to the public**

The Language Bank Rights (LBR) is an electronic application system for managing access to language resources. It is based on the Resource Entitlement Management System (REMS) developed by CSC for research data. A solution is being designed for how the LBR REMS will be accessible by private companies as well.

**<sup>11</sup>** GDPR Article 35(1).

**<sup>12</sup>** GDPR Article 35(2).

**<sup>13</sup>** GDPR Article 35(7).

The Language Bank of Finland will begin redistributing the speech data when a sufficient amount of material has been donated and when the appropriate rights application process is in place in the beginning of 2022. For academic researchers, the use of the data will be free of charge, like the rest of the services of the Language Bank of Finland. For commercial use, a fee will probably be charged in order to cover handling costs.

### **5 Technical implementation**

Speech for the Donate Speech campaign14 could be donated via a web browser or mobile app, both of which offered a selection of tasks with light-hearted themes that aimed to inspire and encourage the user to talk about a particular topic. Representatives from both industry and academia developed the general specifications for the app. The software solution development company Solita developed the apps. The software platform has been published as open-source software,15 allowing other organizations to build their own systems for collecting similar speech material or to enable specialized collection campaigns by researchers, or similar campaigns in other countries.

Technical voice quality is a complicated topic of its own. Having the microphone near the user is imperative, so advising more relaxed use, like leaving the phone on the table, would introduce more echoes and weaker signal. A discussion format with a group of people was also ruled out. There would have been obvious benefits, like the free-flowing, back-and-forth dialogue that characterizes a group discussion but does not exist in a single-speaker situation. However, that would have presented technical challenges rendering it hard to use when everybody should be close to a single microphone, or far away from each other with everyone having his own device to minimize cross-feeds and echoes in the signal. In addition, multiple signals would need to be synchronized in the backend system, or there would be a need to register which phones were co-recording the multi-mic discussion. For this reason, no user testing was conducted on which styles of dialogue triggers would work best for yielding interesting, differing flows of dialogue.

The recordings were kept simple by recording the speech signal in the highest lossless formats possible and accompanying them with metadata about the system, phone type, and version. The metadata therefore allowed for some post- processing

**<sup>14</sup>** https://lahjoitapuhetta.fi/

**<sup>15</sup>** https://github.com/CSCfi/Kielipankki-donatespeech-backend

corrections using, for example, sound equalization according to microphone type. A rudimentary VU-meter to give feedback to the user about an acceptable signal level was considered but not implemented, to conserve battery and diminish the development burden. Based on user testing, the usefulness of this feedback was also in doubt. First, the meter would provide a distraction or most likely be ignored; second, educating the user on how to interpret this additional information would encumber the user interface; and third, the improvement of the signal would not be substantial as the user would mainly move closer to the microphone for some time.

In the end, users were instructed to speak freely in their own environment. A clear signal in a noise-free environment is often preferable, but currently the recordings have a bit more variety as they also contain some noise, such as people in the background or wind in outdoor settings. In any case, according to the user tests, most people did the recording sessions on their own in rather quiet indoor settings. A delayed transmit in the background of locally stored recordings for uploading to the cloud was prepared in case the user did not have a steady internet connection, but it was probably not that important a feature.

The web, Android and iOS were chosen as platforms for smartphones, tablets, and computers with microphones. There was also an associated website informing users about the campaign and Yle published its own articles and campaign site. The apps were released from the Yle account instead of using separate dedicated or campaign-specific accounts to lend trust in an established entity to the campaign.

The solution architecture consisted of multiple frontends on different platforms, backend services and databases to collect data in the cloud, the web hosting, and the analytics. By splitting responsibilities for analytics and backend hosting, the visibility of the legal entities could be limited, so the party driving the campaigns had the option to access usage data to focus the campaign efforts without access to the raw speech donations. The system was developed for monolingual use, but further adaptation and localization to other languages and other themes was kept in mind.

To comply with the GDPR and to enable deletion of contributions, the backend allows easy deletion of user submissions through a long random identifier given to the user at the time of speech donation. There are no other user-specific identifiers in the backend data. One still needs to consider that individual users may be identifiable by their metadata in the case that the participating group is small or a combination of metadata very specific. For example, men of a certain age bracket in a small geographical area with a particular dialect background could potentially result in a tiny group of people both in the collected data and the real world. The technical platform as such does not restrict the collection of overly

specific metadata, as the GDPR-compliant processing of data is the responsibility of the controller and the processors when further processing the data or publishing findings in a way that is anonymous.

In spring 2021, the Android and iOS mobile application versions of Donate Speech were submitted to the annual marketing competition GrandOne, for web applications launched during the previous year. The Donate Speech applications won the prestigious first prize16 in the mobile service category and an honourable mention in the category for best data use. Yle also submitted the Donate Speech campaign to the annual Prix Europa competition for European broadcasters, and in autumn 2021, after a thorough evaluation, the Donate speech campaign won the category of Best European Digital Audio Project 202117 in the highly prestigious TV, radio, and online product competition, chosen from among 684 entries from 26 countries. The award recognized a fresh way to conceptualize broadcasting and its output; the new cooperation model between commercial and public service entities and a broadcasting company like Yle; and a great web service accompanied by a light-hearted and humorous campaign.

### **6 Characteristics of the Donated Speech data**

The objective for the Donate Speech campaign was to collect 10,000 hours of speech during half a year of campaigning. That would have meant about obtaining 8.5 seconds from each 10- to 70-year-old person in Finland, or getting 600,000 persons to donate a minute each, or 120,000 persons to donate 5 minutes each. The objective was considered quite a stretch but attainable in an optimal situation.

The campaign collected about 3,500 hours in half a year. The launch on national TV in June 2020 inspired the biggest number of contributions, but as can be seen in Figure 1, the summer of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic was quite active. The campaign was able to reach new audiences throughout the autumn but at a considerably slower pace. Towards the end of the campaign, there was a push on regional radio to collect dialects and the last 10% was collected in a week around Christmas 2020. Yle had a campaign page for its campaign events.18 The campaign had officially ended by New Year 2021, but trailing infomercials

**<sup>16</sup>** https://grandone.fi/kilpailutyo/?entry=lahjoita-puhetta-siivittaeae-suomenkielistae-puheentunnistusta

**<sup>17</sup>** PRIX EUROPA 2021 Winners – PRIX EUROPA (https://www.prixeuropa.eu/news/2021/10/15winners-y4emh).

**<sup>18</sup>** https://yle.fi/aihe/lahjoita-puhetta

**Figure 1:** Distinct user count by date.

and reruns were still broadcast during the spring of 2021, resulting in a trickle of additional contributions.

Figure 2 breaks down the speech donations by age group. There are hours of data representing a wide range of age brackets. Perhaps surprisingly, 21- to 30-year-old females, unfazed by the somewhat technical set-up, donated most of the speech. The smallest amount of speech was donated by very young participants (1–10 years old) and very old participants (80 years or more). Two groups to consider for future focus activities are teens around 11–20, and retired people around 71–80. Both have distinctive characteristics from an AI development point of view, speaking with different pitch, vocabulary, pace, breaks, and potentially with interleaving and heavier breathing. One industry partner considers developing AI-powered elderly care systems, and specific modes like talking while lying down would also be useful.

Not everyone provided all the metadata, but among those who provided metadata, we can make some interesting observations. People between 20–60 years old made around three quarters of the donations. More than 70% of the donors were women. As expected, almost half of the donations were from the four regions with the largest Finnish cities: Uusimaa (including Helsinki and Espoo), Pohjois-Pohjanmaa (including Oulu), Varsinais-Suomi (including Turku), and Pirkanmaa (including Tampere), but donations were made from all the regions of Finland and 50 different counties, with 95% of the donors being native speakers. We note that the geographic areas have about the same amount of donations per 100,000 inhabitants, with approximately 60% to 150% deviation from the mean. A considerably larger share of Swedish and Saami minority speakers in some areas probably explains a couple of outliers with smaller contributions. More than two thirds of the data was donated by students, retired persons, teachers, entrepreneurs, experts, and nurses (in descending order of contributor number) with the remainder contributed by more than 30 other professions from diverse areas of society. Approximately 62% had a higher education and 28% a secondary education.

Interestingly, the web interface was used by two thirds of the donors, and only 20% used the Android app with the rest using the iPhone app. Close to 90% of the more than 220,000 recordings were between 10 seconds and 3 minutes, with the median length being 30–60 seconds, in the end totalling roughly 4,000 hours.

There are a couple of limitations as to the reliability of these figures. The analytics data consist of a sequence of events of donations and interleaved metadata questions. Some users have not answered all the demographic questions. Other users might have multiple differing answers so the attribution of donation hours per metadata subcategory remains an estimate. In addition, the analytics system missed about 10% of the user events. Still, we believe that the figures paint quite a good initial picture of the success of the campaign.

After 80 hours of an initial random sample of the speech data was quality checked and manually transliterated, the initial impression was quite positive. Small random samples (1, 10, and 80 hours) of manually transcribed data were evaluated by the current automatic speech recognition technology group at Aalto University to assess how accurately this material can be automatically transcribed, what kind of errors occur, and how the accuracy varies according to the conditions and given metadata. The initial impressions were rather positive: the material is on average not harder to recognize than previously recorded conversations at the Aalto University, despite being more diverse in terms of speakers, ages, dialects, and topics, as well as recording devices and conditions.

### **7 Conclusion**

Even though the target of 10,000 hours was ambitious, the Donate Speech campaign has managed to collect an extensive resource of Finnish colloquial speech from a large number of speakers in just a few months. The campaign was implemented by Yle (the National Broadcasting Company of Finland) in cooperation with Ilmastorahasto (former state development company Vake) and the University of Helsinki. The University of Helsinki represented FIN-CLARIN and its service centre Kielipankki (the Language Bank of Finland), through which the FIN-CLARIN members make available various language resources, both corpora and tools.

Society currently requires a number of digital user skills, such as the utilization of mobile devices. If a user's vision is impaired or their finger dexterity is insufficient for a device, a user may currently be excluded from many services. To develop such services, speech data that is also available for commercial purposes was needed. At the beginning of the 21st century, the efforts and resources of Finnish speech technology and spoken language research were scattered all over Finland and represented by relatively small teams or researchers or public bodies. While automatic speech recognition (speech-to-text) and speech synthesis (text-to-speech) in Finnish have been available in a few devices and applications for several years (e.g., as speech capabilities in Apple and Google products), implementing or enhancing many end-user services still requires better and more reliable processing support for colloquial Finnish. To remedy this there was a need for collecting and making available a sizable amount of speech data that could also be used for commercial purposes.

In Finland, there are several extensive speech databases that were previously collected for linguistic research by the Institute for the Languages of Finland, the universities, and memory organizations, but for commercial purposes access to them is limited. Renegotiating licenses for corpora to allow business use is one way to add commercially usable speech material, but it is often not feasible to renegotiate access rights after data has already been collected and licensed.

The Donate Speech campaign had a Finnish predecessor called Prosovar as regards new methodology and new ways of obtaining speech data over the internet, implementing a crowdsourcing approach. The goal of the Donate Speech campaign was not merely to collect a vast amount of any kind of speech, but to reach out to as many different groups of Finnish speakers and to as many individuals as possible. In marketing the campaign to citizens, it was emphasized that all variants of spoken Finnish are welcome, including speech from second-language Finnish learners. However, in order to understand the privacy notice and the instructions, a certain level of language proficiency was required from the speech donors. In order to strike a balance between the material goals, the technical possibilities, and the resources that were available, design workshops were organized for all interested parties.

From the beginning, it was clear that the processing of data must be conducted in a legally and ethically sound way. All the central actors in the project (Kielipankki at the University of Helsinki, Vake, and Yle) are public organizations that cannot ignore these aspects. To better understand the risks and possible problems that the processing of personal data may cause to individuals, a careful risk assessment was also performed. After completing all the six steps of the balance test, it seemed clear that a legitimate interest existed, met the legal requirements, and was not overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject. A data protection impact assessment (DPIA) was carried out because of possible risks related to the processing of data. In particular, the extensive processing as well as the new technologies and innovation development related to the purpose of processing were considered. The Language Bank Rights (LBR) is an electronic application system for managing access to language resources. The Language Bank of Finland will begin redistributing the speech data when a sufficient amount of material has been donated and when the appropriate rights application process is in place in the beginning of 2022.

In the end, Yle developed around 40 rather straightforward themes for stimulating the collecting of speech data. As part of the campaign, Yle made comical infomercials with requests to the general public to donate speech. These were broadcast during programme breaks in national radio and TV channels during the summer and autumn of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, with some trailing reruns during spring 2021. Speech for the Donate Speech campaign (Lahjoita puhetta) could be donated via a web browser or mobile app, both of which offered a selection of tasks with light-hearted themes that aimed to inspire and encourage the user to talk about a particular topic. To comply with the GDPR and to enable deletion of contributions, the backend allows easy deletion of user submissions through a long random identifier given to the user at the time of speech donation.