The norwegian language bank ("sprakbanken") – national infrastructure for language technology


Where
Norway
When
2020
Who
National library of norway
Website of the policy/measure
Website
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Description of the policy/measure

An increasing number of products and services are based on language technology. to enable norwegian citizens to use the products and services in their own language, good language resources in both norwegian and sami are needed. in order to develop high-quality language technology for norwegian language, big data sets with norwegian speech and text are needed. the norwegian language bank is a national infrastructure for language technology and provides such datasets. the resources are aimed at companies that develop language technology software, as well as language researchers and students, and all the resources that are created are available online and have an open-source license. the language bank is an infrastructure for language technology in many areas of society, and is not limited to the cultural and creative sectors. divvun and giellatekno, the research group for saami language technology at the arctic university of norway, are both developing language technology tools for sami. the government will continue facilitating the collection of and access to language resources, cf. norway's national strategy for artificial intelligence (2020) and white paper on language policy (2020).

Results achieved

The development of more products/services based on language technology in norwegian and sami.

Financial resources allocated to the policy

The language bank was established in 2010 with an annual funding of about 10 million norwegian kroner (nok) a year. in 2019, the government increased the allocation to the language bank by 9 million norwegian kroner (nok).