The Centre for Language Technology at the University of the Faroe Islands has a special story behind it, which illustrates quite well the specific importance language technology holds.
In addition to linguists and computer scientists, people with special needs have a particular interest in language technology. In the Faroe Islands, Grunnurin Talutøkni has played a significant role, and it was a major step for Faroese language technology when the Ravnur Project, which was initiated and led by Grunnurin Talutøkni, concluded with a presentation at Kongshøll last year. Karin Kass, the leader of Grunnurin Talutøkni and a driving force behind the project, handed out to those who had participated in the project a glass raven each as a token on the project having been accomplished.
The resources made by the Ravnur Project can be likened to a timber yard or a well-organized language technology repository that anyone interested can visit and draw inspiration from completely free of charge.
An excellent result has already been seen with the new and beautiful app VoisIT.
Following an agreement with Grunnurin Talutøkni, the University of the Faroe Islands has taken over the resources from the Ravnur Project. The purpose is to ensure that it will be continually updated, maintained, and accessible for various language technology purposes. At the same time, the University has established the Centre for Language Technology, and on July 1st, a researcher, Iben Nyholm Debess, was appointed to the position.
The collaboration with Grunnurin Talutøkni and other partners, both in the Faroe Islands and abroad, continues.
The Centre for Language Technology is part of the Faculty for Faroese Language and Literature and operates in close collaboration with the Faculty of Science and Technology. A speech recognition interface cabable of analyzing audio files is gradually becoming established and has already been tried out. At the Faculty of Science and Technology it is Barbara Scalvini, an assistant professor, who works with language technology and the new speech recognition platform.
The new project, Faroese Megaword Corpus (FMC), is about to start, with the aim of developing a large and diverse text corpus.
The corpus will be a cornerstone in the data infrastructure at the Language Technology Department and will benefit many projects, as well as the work on various language technology solutions in the future.
The project is based on collaboration with Árnastofnun in Iceland, and the funding is Nordic. Additionally, research is already being conducted in machine translation and sentiment analysis, which are highly suitable for both language technology research and industry applications. A Ph.D. project in language technology at the Centre for Language Technology will commence in the coming year.
Among those involved in the Ravnur project were students at the Faculty for Faroese Language and Literature and Faroese linguistics students abroad, as well as other linguists in the Faroe Islands and international specialists. Many of them are now part of the language technology environment emerging at the University of the Faroe Islands.
All work at the Centre for Language Technology is based on a vision of openness in data, culture, and research.
Iben Nyholm Debess has been appointed to coordinate the work at the Centre for Language Technology.
