Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe’s specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

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.

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

In this paper, we describe the correction of PoS tags in a new Icelandic corpus, MIM-GOLD, consisting of about 1 million tokens sampled from the Tagged Icelandic Corpus, MÍM, released in 2013. The goal is to use the corpus, among other things, as a new gold standard for training and testing PoS taggers. The construction of the corpus was first described in 2010 together with preliminary work on error detection and correction. In this paper, we describe further the correction of tags in the corpus. We describe manual correction and a method for semi-automatic error detection and correction. We show that, even after manual correction, the number of tagging errors in the corpus can be reduced significantly by applying our semi-automatic detection and correction method. After the semi-automatic error correction, preliminary evaluation of tagging accuracy shows very low error rates. We hope that the existence of the corpus will make it possible to improve PoS taggers for Icelandic text.

This paper presents ongoing work that aims to improve machine parsing of Faroese using a combination of Faroese and Icelandic training data. We show that even if we only have a relatively small parsed corpus of one language, namely 53,000 words of Faroese, we can obtain better results by adding information about phrase structure from a closely related language which has a similar syntax. Our experiment uses the Berkeley parser. We demonstrate that the addition of Icelandic data without any other modification to the experimental setup results in an f-measure improvement from 75.44% to 78.05% in Faroese and an improvement in part-of-speech tagging accuracy from 88.86% to 90.40%.

We describe the background for and building of IcePaHC, a one million word parsed historical corpus of Icelandic which has just been finished. This corpus which is completely free and open contains fragments of 60 texts ranging from the late 12th century to the present. We describe the text selection and text collecting process and discuss the quality of the texts and their conversion to modern Icelandic spelling. We explain why we choose to use a phrase structure Penn style annotation scheme and briefly describe the syntactic anno-tation process. We also describe a spin-off project which is only in its beginning stages: a parsed historical corpus of Faroese. Finally, we advocate the importance of an open source policy as regards language resources.

The META-NORD project has contributed to an open infrastructure for language resources (data and tools) under the META-NET umbrella. This paper presents the key objectives of META-NORD and reports on the results achieved in the first year of the project. META-NORD has mapped and described the national language technology landscape in the Nordic and Baltic countries in terms of language use, language technology and resources, main actors in the academy, industry, government and society; identified and collected the first batch of language resources in the Nordic and Baltic countries; documented, processed, linked, and upgraded the identified language resources to agreed standards and guidelines. The three horizontal multilingual actions in META-NORD are overviewed in this paper: linking and validating Nordic and Baltic wordnets, the harmonisation of multilingual Nordic and Baltic treebanks, and consolidating multilingual terminology resources across European countries. This paper also touches upon intellectual property rights for the sharing of language resources.