It’s Basically the Same Language Anyway: the Case for a Nordic Language Model

Magnus Sahlgren, Fredrik Carlsson, Fredrik Olsson, Love Börjeson


Abstract
When is it beneficial for a research community to organize a broader collaborative effort on a topic, and when should we instead promote individual efforts? In this opinion piece, we argue that we are at a stage in the development of large-scale language models where a collaborative effort is desirable, despite the fact that the preconditions for making individual contributions have never been better. We consider a number of arguments for collaboratively developing a large-scale Nordic language model, include environmental considerations, cost, data availability, language typology, cultural similarity, and transparency. Our primary goal is to raise awareness and foster a discussion about our potential impact and responsibility as NLP community.
Anthology ID:
2021.nodalida-main.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)
Month:
May 31--2 June
Year:
2021
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland (Online)
Editors:
Simon Dobnik, Lilja Øvrelid
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
Linköping University Electronic Press, Sweden
Note:
Pages:
367–372
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nodalida-main.39
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Magnus Sahlgren, Fredrik Carlsson, Fredrik Olsson, and Love Börjeson. 2021. It’s Basically the Same Language Anyway: the Case for a Nordic Language Model. In Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa), pages 367–372, Reykjavik, Iceland (Online). Linköping University Electronic Press, Sweden.
Cite (Informal):
It’s Basically the Same Language Anyway: the Case for a Nordic Language Model (Sahlgren et al., NoDaLiDa 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2021.nodalida-main.39.pdf