This paper introduces a new CLARIN Knowledge Center which is the K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (ACE for short) which has been established at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) at Radboud University. Atypical communication is an umbrella term used here to denote language use by second language learners, people with language disorders or those suffering from language disabilities, but also more broadly by bilinguals and users of sign languages. It involves multiple modalities (text, speech, sign, gesture) and encompasses different developmental stages. ACE closely collaborates with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in order to safeguard GDPR-compliant data storage and access. We explain the mission of ACE and show its potential on a number of showcases and a use case.

We report on a case study of text and images that reveals the inadequacy of simplistic assumptions about their connection and interplay. The context of our work is a larger effort to create automatic systems that can extract event information from online news articles about flooding disasters. We carry out a manual analysis of 1000 articles containing a keyword related to flooding. The analysis reveals that the articles in our data set cluster into seven categories related to different topical aspects of flooding, and that the images accompanying the articles cluster into five categories related to the content they depict. The results demonstrate that flood-related news articles do not consistently report on a single, currently unfolding flooding event and we should also not assume that a flood-related image will directly relate to a flooding-event described in the corresponding article. In particular, spatiotemporal distance is important. We validate the manual analysis with an automatic classifier demonstrating the technical feasibility of multimedia analysis approaches that admit more realistic relationships between text and images. In sum, our case study confirms that closer attention to the connection between text and images has the potential to improve the collection of multimodal information from news articles.