Ravnur
The Ravnur Project group got the assignment to gather and create resources for a BLARK and to make Faroese speech recognition. The project started in 2019 and BLARK 1.0 was published on July 1st 2022.
The Project Group
Language technology intertwines linguistics and IT, so linguists, students at the Faculty for Faroese and other assistants as well as IT workers joined forces to work on this project.
High Quality Recordings
The Project Ravnur has produced speaking samples using high quality microphones. This means that the recordings can be used for many different kinds of technology and research.
All Dialects Represented
In the project much effort was made to have all the dialects in the Faroe Islands represented in the recordings recordings in addition to having recordings of people of different ages.
Open Source
From the start we have emphasised that the Ravnur Resources would be Open Source. That means that the linguistic resources will be made publicly available to download and further develop into different kinds of language technology such as an ASR. This is sharing of knowledge that saves the Faroese (language) society financial resources!
What is a BLARK?
BLARK is an acronym for "Basic Language Resource Kit." In a BLARK you can find all necessary resources to develop different language technology tools (e.g. speech recognition) for a specific language. This BLARK is especially made to produce ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), but the resources it contains can also be used for e.g. speech synthesis, lexicography and linguistic research.
