When did language technology start in Iceland?
Around year 2000
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.
During the last decade, we have witnessed enormous advances in language technology (LT). Applications that allow 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 enables faster development for new domains and languages. However, LT is highly language dependent and it takes considerable 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 digitized language resources, like English, German, Spanish, Japanese, etc. Other languages, that have few speakers and/or lack digitized language resources, run the risk of being left behind. Icelandic is an example of a language with almost a negligible 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 supported 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 BIBREF0. After more than two years of preparation, a consortium consisting 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 communication 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 development of text and speech-based language resources, on the development of core natural language processing (NLP) tools like tokenisers, taggers and parsers, and finally, to publish open-source software in the areas of speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and spell and grammar checking. All deliverables of the programme will be published under open licenses, to encourage use of resources and software in commercial products. While the government-funded programme for the development of resources and infrastructure software builds the backbone of the Icelandic LT programme, another branch is a competitive fund for research and development. This Strategic Research and Development Programme for Language Technology is managed by the Icelandic Centre for Research, Rannís, which publishes calls for applications on a regular basis. The third pillar of the programme is the revival of the joint Master's programme in LT at Reykjavik University (RU) and the University of Iceland (UI). The goal is further to increase the number of PhD students and to build strong knowledge centres for sustainable LT development in Iceland. The budget estimation for the programme, including the competitive fund, education plan and infrastructure costs, is around 14 million euros. Additionally, around 3.6 million euros is expected to be the contribution of the industry through the competitive fund. This paper is structured as follows: In Section SECREF2 we discuss national LT programmes that have been run in other European countries and helped developing the Icelandic project plan. Section SECREF3 gives an overview over the 20 years of LT development in Iceland. Section SECREF4 shows the organisation of the new programme, and in Section SECREF5 we describe the core projects that have been defined for it. Finally, a conclusion is presented in Section SECREF6.