Icelandic Language Resources and Technology: Status and Prospects

… between people in the creation of language …, 2008

We describe the establishment and development of Icelandic language technology since its very beginning ten years ago. The ground was laid with a report from a committee appointed by the Minister of Education, Science and Culture in 1998. In this report, which was delivered in the spring of 1999, the committee proposed several actions to establish Icelandic language technology. This paper reviews the concrete tasks that the committee listed as important and their current status. It is shown that even though we still have a long way to go to reach all the goals set in the report, good progress has been made in most of the tasks. Icelandic participation in Nordic cooperation on language technology has been vital in this respect. In the final part of the paper, we speculate on the cost of Icelandic language technology and the future prospects of a small language like Icelandic in the age of information technology.

The title of my talk is The status and prospects of Icelandic Language Technology . If I had given a talk on this subject four years ago, it would only have lasted a couple of minutes. At that time, Icelandic language technology hardly existed at all. We had a relatively good spell checker, a not so good speech synthesizer, and that was all. There were no programs or even single courses on language technology or computational linguistics at the University, there was no research in these areas, and no software companies were working on language technology. Fortunately, all of this has now changed, to some extent at least. In 2001, the Icelandic Government launched a special Language Technology Project, with the aim of supporting institutions and companies to create basic resources for Icelandic language technology work. This initiative has resulted in several projects which are either finished or well underway. In my talk, I will give an overview of the most important of these projects, and then speculate a little on the prospects of language technology in Iceland.

2010

Abstract We describe the establishment and development of Icelandic language technology since its very begin ning ten years ago. The ground was laid with a report from an Expert Group appointed by the Minister of Education, Science and Culture in 1998. In this report, which was delivered in the spring of 1999, the group proposed several actions to establish Icelandic language technology. This paper reviews the con crete tasks that the group listed as important and their current status.

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2020

In this paper, we describe a new national language technology programme for Icelandic. The programme, which spans a period of five years, aims at making Icelandic usable in communication and interactions in the digital world, by developing accessible, open source language resources and software. The research and development work within the programme is carried out by a consortium of universities, institutions, and private companies, with a strong emphasis on cooperation between academia and industries. Five core projects will be the main content of the programme: language resources, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and spell and grammar checking. We also describe other national language technology programmes and give an overview over the history of language technology in Iceland.

2004

is one of five selected by NorFA for funding beginning January 2004. It has the following goals: • to provide a forum for graduate students in language technology in which they can obtain advanced research training of a standard and breadth which is not available at any one of the individual participating institutions, not even in any single Nordic country alone • to raise the general standard of language technology education in Scandinavia in order to meet the increasing need in industry and academic research of researchers and developers with competence in language technology • to create a broad interdisciplinary platform for graduate education in language technology. This platform should provide a multidisciplinary basis on which the student can build further • to create an international profile by inviting instructors from foreign universities and research institutes and by encouraging interaction View publication stats View publication stats

Nordlyd, 2005

In this paper we outline the Icelandic research plans in the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project and explain why we have made these plans the way we have. We begin by reporting on a pilot project that was conducted in Iceland 2004-2005, explain its nature and describe the resulting plans. As will be seen, our research project includes the collection and analysis of spoken language corpora (" spontaneous speech " of different kinds), collection of syntactic material by using different elicitation techniques (including written questionnaires and interviews), and the comparison of this material. The spoken language corpora are listed and described in the second section of the paper. In the third section we describe how our present (and future) work relates to some previous work done on syntactic variation in Icelandic (and Faroese) and offer some thoughts on the nature of syntactic variation in general.

Nordlyd, 2007

The project “Modern loanwords in the languages of the Nordic countries (MIN – Moderne importord i språka i Norden)” was the first large-scale collaborative project between linguists in the Nordic countries. This article presents both the aim of the project and some experiences from the work with respect to project design, financing and networking.

International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography, 2016

Icelandic lexicography has its origins in the seventeenth century, but the first monolingual Icelandic dictionary was not published until 1963. The complexities of Icelandic grammar impose certain demands in lexicography, as the morphology is rich and irregular, and case assignment of verbs calls for an exact description of argument structure. These demands cannot be met to a satisfactory degree in printed dictionaries, but the advent of online dictionaries has opened up new possibilities. In the past years, the building of a lexicographic macrostructure has undergone changes, introducing multi-word lemmas to a much larger degree than previously possible. Current Icelandic lexicographic work is supported by four major corpora, and a range of other digital resources for the language, but still more are needed. The Icelandic language community is tiny, but through the combined efforts and cooperation of lexicographers and the language technology community, the future seems to be in context-sensitive lexicography, to the benefit of both those groups and, hopefully, also the language community at large.

2007

iii Preface Nordens språkråd och de nordiska språknämnderna har under en räcka av år intresserat sig för språkteknologi, i den fasta förvissningen att olika tillämpningar av språkteknologin kommer att ha en stor betydelse för hur våra språk kan utvecklas i framtiden. Nordens språkråd har bland annat startat ett projekt vars syfte är att tillgängliggöra internordiska ordboks-och terminologiresurser på webben och möjliggöra tvärspråklig sökning. Språknämndernas nätverk tillsatte hösten 2005 en språkteknologisk arbetsgrupp, vars uppgift bland annat är att arbeta för ett ökat samarbete mellan olika språkteknologiska aktörer i Norden och för att få fram fler språkteknologiska resurser. Redan tidigare har Nordiska ministerrådet initierat ett omfattande nordiskt språkteknologiskt forskningsprogram, som genomfördes åren 2000-2004 och resulterade i ett flertal rapporter. I april 2005 anordnade Nordens språkråd en konferens om språkkontrollverktyg. Konferensen hölls i Pargas i Finland och samlade ett fyrtiotal representanter för språknämnder och språkteknologisk forskning och utveckling i hela Norden.