Today, the word of the year for 2023 was chosen. The word of the year is vitlíki, which is the Faroese word for Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The word of the year underlines that AI has become part of daily society and has significance and impact both in work and private life.
AI is a big part of linguistic work. Often we first think of big language models and chatbots like ChatGPT. The chatbots are examples of how well AI manages to understand and produce text that resembles human language. In regards to Faroese language technology, AI and chatbots are not at a stage that makes them useful to the user, but AI has its place in Faroese language technology. At the Centre for Language Technology, we use AI as a method to improve Faroese linguistics. For small languages with limited resources, such as Faroese, AI can make it easier to develop good tools and models. At the Centre, we research how we can use AI to our advantage based on our linguistic foundation. AI is, for example, the method behind the speech recognition model, which can be found here, and which is the foundation under the app VoisIT. Also, the language model FoBERT is trained using AI.
The nominated words in addition to the winning word were:
Góðan morgun Føroyar organized the competition, where listeners send in suggestions for the word of the year to the morning radio show. The Language Council then chooses 10 words out of those that are suggested for the word of the year.
It was Lena Reinert, member of Málráðið, Jón Brian Hvidtfeldt, chairman of Føroysk miðlafólk, and Jastrid á Dalbø, vice-chairwoman in Føroyamál, who chose the word of the year 2023.
We, who use AI as a working tool, are pleased that the word has been recognized as word of the year.
