TY - GEN
T1 - Language technology programme for Icelandic 2019-2023
AU - Nikulásdóttir, Anna Björk
AU - Guðnason, Jón
AU - Ingason, Anton Karl
AU - Loftsson, Hrafn
AU - Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur
AU - Sigurðsson, Einar Freyr
AU - Steingrímsson, Steinþór
N1 - Funding Information: Regarding LT, the Estonian situation is, in many ways, similar to that of Iceland: It has too few users for companies to see opportunities in embarking on development of (costly) LT, but on the other hand society is technologically advanced– people use, or want to be able to use, LT software. In Estonia, the general public wants Estonian to maintain its status, and like Icelandic, the language has a complex inflection system and very active word generation. The problems faced by Estonia are therefore not unlike those that Iceland faces. In Estonia, three consecutive national programmes have been launched. The third national programme, Estonian Language Technology 2018–2027, is currently under way. While the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research has been responsible for the programmes, the universities in Tallinn and Tartu, together with the Institute of the Estonian Language, led the implementation. The National Programme for Estonian Language Technology was launched in 2006. The first phase ran from 2006 to 2010. All results of this first phase, language resources and software prototypes, were released as public domain. All such resources and tools are preserved long term and availablefrom the Center of Estonian Language Resources. 33 projects were funded, which included the creation of reusable language resources and development of essential linguistic software, as well as bringing the relevant infrastructure up to date (Vider et al., 2012). The programme managed to significantly improve upon existing Estonian language resources, both in size, annotation and standardisation. In creating software, most noticeable results were inspeechtechnology. Reportingontheresultsofthepro-gramme (Videret al., 2012) stress that the first phase of the programme created favourable conditions for LT development in Estonia. According to an evaluationof the success of the programme, at least 84% of the projects had satisfactory results. The total budged for this first phase was 3.4 million euros. The second phase of the programme ran from 2011 to 2017 with a total budget of approx. 5.5 million euros. It focused on the implementation and integration of existing resources and software prototypes in public services. Project proposals were called for, funding several types of actions in an open competition. The main drawback of this method is that it does not fully cover the objectives, and LT support for Estonian is thus not systematically developed. Researchers were also often mostly interested in results using prototypes rather than stable applications. As most of the projects were instigated at public institutes, relation to IT business was weak. Furthermore, the programme does not deal explicitly with LT education. On the other hand, the state of LT in Estonia soon become relatively good compared to languages with similar number of speakers (Vider, 2015). Publisher Copyright: © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Icelandic
KW - Infrastructure
KW - Language technology programmes
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85096554795
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - LREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings
SP - 3414
EP - 3422
BT - LREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings
A2 - Calzolari, Nicoletta
A2 - Bechet, Frederic
A2 - Blache, Philippe
A2 - Choukri, Khalid
A2 - Cieri, Christopher
A2 - Declerck, Thierry
A2 - Goggi, Sara
A2 - Isahara, Hitoshi
A2 - Maegaard, Bente
A2 - Mariani, Joseph
A2 - Mazo, Helene
A2 - Moreno, Asuncion
A2 - Odijk, Jan
A2 - Piperidis, Stelios
PB - European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
T2 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020
Y2 - 11 May 2020 through 16 May 2020
ER -