The Zurich Center for Linguistics (LiZZ - Linguistik Zentrum Zürich), the Language and Space University Research Priority Program (URPP Language and Space), and associated laboratories and institutes at UZH have been jointly granted funds for a significant upgrade of their facilities for research. The Linguistic Reserach Infrastructure (LiRI) project will enable internationally significant research in linguistics, putting Switzerland at the forefront of experimental and Big Data based research.

The LiRI project will improve both laboratory facilities for linguistic research (and related research fields) and technical infrastructure for the analysis of language and speech. The project will harness the latest data science developments to greatly increase data storage, processing and analysis capabilities. It will also enable the collection of naturalistic data in a methodologically rigorous fashion previously only possible in laboratory settings.

The LiRI facilities will be available to all researchers working with language data. When fully operational, it will serve as a national platform for linguistics data storage/processing/science, uniting as many linguistic data resource types as possible in one data center.

The LiRI project has been in development since 2017 and will continue to evolve and grow in coming years. It will expand its stock of devices and advertise new positions as funding permits. At the same time, it will initiate collaborative research projects and establish long-term partnerships between LiRI and external teams.