Børre Gaup


2024

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The Ethical Question – Use of Indigenous Corpora for Large Language Models
Linda Wiechetek | Flammie A. Pirinen | Børre Gaup | Trond Trosterud | Maja Lisa Kappfjell | Sjur Moshagen
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Creating language technology based on language data has become very popular with the recent advances of large language models and neural network technologies. This makes language resources very valuable, and especially in case of indigenous languages, the scarce resources are even more precious. Given the good results of simply fetching everything you can from the internet and feeding it to neural networks in English, there has been more work on doing the same for all languages. However, indigenous language resources as they are on the web are not comparable in that they would encode the most recent normativised language in all its aspects. This problematic is further due to not understanding the texts input to models or output by models by the people who work on them. Corpora also have intelligent property rights and copyrights that are not respected. Furthermore, the web is filled with the result of language model -generated texts. In this article we describe an ethical and sustainable way to work with indigenous languages.

2022

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Unmasking the Myth of Effortless Big Data - Making an Open Source Multi-lingual Infrastructure and Building Language Resources from Scratch
Linda Wiechetek | Katri Hiovain-Asikainen | Inga Lill Sigga Mikkelsen | Sjur Moshagen | Flammie Pirinen | Trond Trosterud | Børre Gaup
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Machine learning (ML) approaches have dominated NLP during the last two decades. From machine translation and speech technology, ML tools are now also in use for spellchecking and grammar checking, with a blurry distinction between the two. We unmask the myth of effortless big data by illuminating the efforts and time that lay behind building a multi-purpose corpus with regard to collecting, mark-up and building from scratch. We also discuss what kind of language technology minority languages actually need, and to what extent the dominating paradigm has been able to deliver these tools. In this context we present our alternative to corpus-based language technology, which is knowledge-based language technology, and we show how this approach can provide language technology solutions for languages being outside the reach of machine learning procedures. We present a stable and mature infrastructure (GiellaLT) containing more than hundred languages and building a number of language technology tools that are useful for language communities.

2021

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No more fumbling in the dark - Quality assurance of high-level NLP tools in a multi-lingual infrastructure
Linda Wiechetek | Flammie A Pirinen | Børre Gaup | Thomas Omma
Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Computational Linguistics of Uralic Languages