Creating a Basic Language Resource Kit for Faroese

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 4637–4643 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 4637 Creating a Basic Language Resource Kit for Faroese Annika Simonsen1, Sandra Saxov Lamhauge2, Iben Nyholm Debess2, Peter Juel Henrichsen3 1Grunnurin Talutøkni, 2University of the Faroe Islands, 3Dansk Sprognævn 1Íslandsvegur 10A, 100 Tórshavn, Faroe Islands 2V. U. Hammershaimbs gøta 22, 100 Tórshavn, Faroe Islands, 3Adelgade 119B, 5400 Bogense, Denmark annika.simonsen@hotmail.com, sandrasl@setur.fo, ibennd@setur.fo, pjh@dsn.dk Abstract The biggest challenges we face in developing LR and LT for Faroese is the lack of existing resources. A few resources already exist for Faroese, but many of them are either of insufficient size and quality or are not easily accessible. Therefore, the Faroese ASR project, Ravnur, set out to make a BLARK for Faroese. The BLARK is still in the making, but many of its resources have already been produced or collected. The LR status is framed by mentioning existing LR of relevant size and quality. The specific components of the BLARK are presented as well as the working principles behind the BLARK. The BLARK will be a pillar in Faroese LR, being relatively substantial in both size, quality, and diversity. It will be open-source, inviting other small languages to use it as an inspiration to create their own BLARK. We comment on the faulty yet sprouting LT situation in the Faroe Islands. The LR and LT challenges are not solved with just a BLARK. Some initiatives are therefore proposed to better the prospects of Faroese LT. The open- source principle of the project should facilitate further development. Keywords: low-resource language, BLARK, Faroese 1. Introduction This article presents the Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) for Faroese, collected by the authors in the course of the ongoing Faroese ASR project, Ravnur. The project was founded in January 2019 by a number of public and private initiators and investors, including the Faroese government. The project is expected to be finished by summer of 2022. The main purpose of the project is to create all necessary constituents for developing high quality Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Faroese. The biggest challenge of making ASR (as well as Text-to-Speech (TTS) and other language technology) for small languages is the lack of language resources (Nikulasdóttir et al., 2018), which makes the development of such resources a vital part of the project. Section 2 introduces the existing language technology (LT) for Faroese. In section 3, we go into details about our BLARK, including a presentation of the toolbox created as part of the ASR project. Section 4 concludes with perspectives and prospects for the future. 2. Existing LT for Faroese There are estimated to be 75.000 native speakers of Faroese (faroeislands.fo, n.d.). Like other low-resource languages (for Icelandic, see Nikulásdóttir et al., 2020), Faroese is rarely supported in LT software and applications from international suppliers due to its market size. However, several institutions have taken the initiative to create smaller language resources for their own …

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