Norsk i den digitale tidsalderen - Meta-Net

technology will feature soware that understands not
just spoken or written letters and sounds but entire
words and sentences, and supports users far better be-
cause it speaks, knows and understands their language.
Forerunners of such developments are IBM’s supercom-
puter Watson that was able to defeat the US-champion
in the game of “Jeopardy”, and Apple’s mobile assistant
Siri for the iPhone that can react to voice commands
and answer questions in English, German, French and
Japanese. A Norwegian speech dictation system for the
iPhone has also become available but it is still less reli-
able than the English version.
Human users are starting to communicate using the
technology in their own language. Devices will be able
to automatically find the most important news and
information from the world’s digital knowledge store
in reaction to easy-to-use voice commands. Language-
enabled technology will be able to translate automati-
cally or assist interpreters; summarise conversations and
documents and to support users in learning scenarios.
For example, it may help immigrants to learn the Nor-
wegian language and integrate more fully into our soci-
ety.
Information and communication technologies will en-
able industrial and service robots (currently under de-
velopment in research laboratories) to faithfully under-
stand what their users want them to do and then proudly
report on their achievements. is level of performance
means going way beyond simple character sets and lexi-
cons, spell checkers and pronunciation rules. e tech-
nology must move on from simplistic approaches and
start modelling language in an all-encompassing way,
taking syntax as well as semantics into account to un-
derstand the dri of questions and generate rich and rel-
evant answers.
Not all European languages are equally well prepared
for this future. is report presents an evaluation of the
status of language technology support for 30 European
languages, based on four key areas: machine translation,
speech processing, text analysis, as well as basic resources
needed for building language technology applications.
e languages were grouped into five clusters. Unsur-
prisingly, Norwegian is in the cluster at the bottom or
only one up for all of the tools and resources listed. It lags
far behind large languages like German and French, for
instance. But even language technology resources and
tools for those languages clearly do not yet reach the
quality and coverage of comparable resources and tools
for the English language, which is in the lead in almost
all language technology areas.
In the government White Paper no. 48 [3] it is asserted
that language technology will be one of the most cru-
cial areas in the battle to preserve our language. What
needs to be done, then, in order to ensure the future of
the Norwegian language in the information society? In
2002, an expert group established by the government es-
timated that it would require an investment of 20 mil-
lion NOK per year during the first five years [4]. Even
though Språkbanken is now established, fact remains
that the yearly investment so far has been only a small
fraction of the estimated required effort. It should there-
fore come as no surprise that Norwegian language tech-
nology is still in its infancy. Five million speakers are
too few to sustain costly development of new products.
Norwegian IT industries and especially SMEs cannot by
themselves take the cost of building up large language
resources and tools for Norwegian. Continued public
support for Norwegian language technology is neces-
sary in order to guarantee the exploitation of the tools
already developed and the knowledge and experience of
researchers and companies which has already been ac-
crued.
e Norwegian language is not in imminent danger
from the prowess of English language computing. How-
ever, the whole situation could change dramatically
when a new generation of technologies really starts to
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