Language Technology Programme for Icelandic 2019-2023

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3414–3422 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3414 Language Technology Programme for Icelandic 2019–2023 Anna Björk Nikulásdóttir1, Jón Guðnason2, Anton Karl Ingason3, Hrafn Loftsson2, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson3,4, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson4, Steinþór Steingrímsson2,4 The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies4, Grammatek1, Reykjavík University2, University of Iceland3 Árnagarði við Suðurgötu, IS-102 Reykjavík3,4, Suðurgötu 57, IS-300 Akranes1, Menntavegi 1, IS-102 Reykjavík2 anna@grammatek.com, jg@ru.is, antoni@hi.is, hrafn@ru.is, eirikur@hi.is, einar.freyr.sigurdsson@arnastofnun.is, steinthor.steingrimsson@arnastofnun.is Abstract 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. Keywords: language technology programmes, infrastructure, Icelandic 1. Introduction During the last decade, we have witnessed enormous ad- vances in language technology (LT). Applications that al- low users to interact with technology via spoken or written natural language are emerging in all areas, and access to language resources and open-source software libraries en- ables faster development for new domains and languages. However, LT is highly language dependent and it takes con- siderable resources to develop LT for new languages. The recent LT development has focused on languages that have both a large number of speakers and huge amounts of dig- itized language resources, like English, German, Spanish, Japanese, etc. Other languages, that have few speakers and/or lack digitized language resources, run the risk of be- ing left behind. Icelandic is an example of a language with almost a neg- ligible number of speakers, in terms of market size, since only about 350,000 people speak Icelandic as their native language. Icelandic is therefore seldom on the list of sup- ported languages in LT software and applications. The Icelandic Government decided in 2017 to fund a five- year programme for Icelandic LT, based on a report written by a group of LT experts (Nikulásdóttir et al., 2017). Af- ter more than two years of preparation, a consortium con- sisting of universities, institutions, associations, and private companies started the work on the programme on the 1st of October 2019. The goal of the programme is to ensure that Icelandic can be made available in LT applications, and thus will be usable in all areas of communication. Furthermore, that access to information and other language-based com- munication and interaction in Icelandic will be accessible to all, e.g. via speech synthesis or speech-to-text systems. The focus of the programme will be on the …

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