Making the low-resource language, Icelandic, accessible and usable in Language Technology is a work in progress and is supported by the Icelandic government. Creating resources and suitable training data (e.g., a dependency treebank) is a fundamental part of that work. We describe work on a parallel Icelandic dependency treebank based on Universal Dependencies (UD). This is important because it is the first parallel treebank resource for the language and since several other languages already have a resource based on the same text. Two Icelandic treebanks based on phrase-structure grammar have been built and ongoing work aims to convert them to UD. Previously, limited work has been done on dependency grammar for Icelandic. The current project aims to ameliorate this situation by creating a small dependency treebank from scratch. Creating a treebank is a laborious task so the process was implemented in an accessible manner using freely available tools and resources. The parallel data in the UD project was chosen as a source because this would furthermore give us the first parallel treebank for Icelandic. The Icelandic parallel UD corpus will be published as part of UD version 2.6.

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.

Spell checkers and other proofreading software are crucial tools for people with dyslexia and other reading disabilities. Most spell checkers automatically detect spelling mistakes by looking up individual words and seeing if they exist in the vocabulary. However, one of the biggest challenges of automatic spelling correction is how to deal with real-word errors, i.e. spelling mistakes which lead to a real but unintended word, such as when then is written in place of than. These errors account for 20% of all spelling mistakes made by people with dyslexia. As both words exist in the vocabulary, a simple dictionary lookup will not detect the mistake. The only way to disambiguate which word was actually intended is to look at the context in which the word appears. This problem is particularly apparent in languages with rich morphology where there is often minimal orthographic difference between grammatical items. In this paper, we present our novel confusion set corpus for Icelandic and discuss how it could be used for context-sensitive spelling correction. We have collected word pairs from seven different categories, chosen for their homophonous properties, along with sentence examples and frequency information from said pairs. We present a small-scale machine learning experiment using a decision tree binary classification which results range from 73% to 86% average accuracy with 10-fold cross validation. While not intended as a finalized result, the method shows potential and will be improved in future research.