Parallel corpora are key to developing good machine translation systems. However, abundant parallel data are hard to come by, especially for languages with a low number of speakers. When rich morphology exacerbates the data sparsity problem, it is imperative to have accurate alignment and filtering methods that can help make the most of what is available by maximising the number of correctly translated segments in a corpus and minimising noise by removing incorrect translations and segments containing extraneous data. This paper sets out a research plan for improving alignment and filtering methods for parallel texts in low-resource settings. We propose an effective unsupervised alignment method to tackle the alignment problem. Moreover, we propose a strategy to supplement state-of-the-art models with automatically extracted information using basic NLP tools to effectively handle rich morphology.

Automatic term extraction (ATE) from texts is critical for effective terminology work in small speech communities. We present TermPortal, a workbench for terminology work in Iceland, featuring the first ATE system for Icelandic. The tool facilitates standardization in terminology work in Iceland, as it exports data in standard formats in order to streamline gathering and distribution of the material. In the project we focus on the domain of finance in order to do be able to fulfill the needs of an important and large field. We present a comprehensive survey amongst the most prominent organizations in that field, the results of which emphasize the need for a good, up-to-date and accessible termbank and the willingness to use terms in Icelandic. Furthermore we present the ATE tool for Icelandic, which uses a variety of methods and shows great potential with a recall rate of up to 95% and a high C-value, indicating that it competently finds term candidates that are important to the input text.

LARA (Learning and Reading Assistant) is an open source platform whose purpose is to support easy conversion of plain texts into multimodal online versions suitable for use by language learners. This involves semi-automatically tagging the text, adding other annotations and recording audio. The platform is suitable for creating texts in multiple languages via crowdsourcing techniques that can be used for teaching a language via reading and listening. We present results of initial experiments by various collaborators where we measure the time required to produce substantial LARA resources, up to the length of short novels, in Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Swedish and Turkish. The first results are encouraging. Although there are some startup problems, the conversion task seems manageable for the languages tested so far. The resulting enriched texts are posted online and are freely available in both source and compiled form.

We introduce an array of open and accessible tools to facilitate the use of the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus, in the field of Natural Language Processing as well as for students, linguists, sociologists and others benefitting from using large corpora. A KWIC engine, powered by the Swedish Korp tool is adapted to the specifics of the corpus. An n-gram viewer, highly customizable to suit different needs, allows users to study word usage throughout the period of our text collection. A frequency dictionary provides much sought after information about word frequency statistics, computed for each subcorpus as well as aggregate, disambiguating homographs based on their respective lemmas and morphosyntactic tags. Furthermore, we provide n-grams based on the corpus, and a variety of pre-trained word embeddings models, based on word2vec, GloVe, fastText and ELMo. For three of the model types, multiple word embedding models are available trained with different algorithms and using either lemmatised or unlemmatised texts.

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 contribution describes an ongoing project of speech data collection, using the web application Samrómur which is built upon Common Voice, Mozilla Foundation’s web platform for open-source voice collection. The goal of the project is to build a large-scale speech corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Icelandic. Upon completion, Samrómur will be the largest open speech corpus for Icelandic collected from the public domain. We discuss the methods used for the crowd-sourcing effort and show the importance of marketing and good media coverage when launching a crowd-sourcing campaign. Preliminary results exceed our expectations, and in one month we collected data that we had estimated would take three months to obtain. Furthermore, our initial dataset of around 45 thousand utterances has good demographic coverage, is gender-balanced and with proper age distribution. We also report on the task of validating the recordings, which we have not promoted, but have had numerous hours invested by volunteers.

We describe the acquisition, annotation and encoding of the corpus of the Althingi parliamentary proceedings. The first version of the corpus includes speeches from 1911-2019. It comprises 406 thousand speeches and over 219 million words. The corpus has been automatically part-of-speech tagged and lemmatised. It is annotated with extensive metadata about the speeches, speakers and political parties, including speech topic, whether the speaker is in the government coalition or opposition, age and gender of speaker at the time of delivery, references to sound and video recordings and more. The corpus is encoded in accordance with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines and conforms to the Parla-CLARIN schema. We plan to update the corpus annually and its major versions will be archived in the CLARIN.IS repository. It is available for download and search using the KORP concordance tool. Furthermore, information on word frequency are accessible in a custom made web application and an n-gram viewer.