Norsk i den digitale tidsalderen - Meta-Net

Norwegian’s wide variety of dialects is a
challenge for machines attempting to convert
speech into text or text into speech.
e Norwegian compounding system, shared with
other Germanic languages, poses a challenge for speech
technology as well as for technologies for the writ-
ten language (see below). It allows speakers to join to-
gether words quite freely in order to coin new words.
For instance, the words aske (ash), krise (crisis) and
pakke (package) can be compounded into askekrisep-
akke. Some of them are only used occasionally, while
some represent terminology in specialised domains, and
others become lexicalised and are entered into dictio-
naries.
Furthermore, most Norwegian dialects have contrastive
use of pitch realised as two distinctive word intona-
tions, oen called toneme 1 and 2. ese tonal accents,
combined with the lack of a one-to-one relation be-
tween sounds and letters in Norwegian, pose a partic-
ular challenge to any speech technology. Among other
things, Norwegian has a wide range of homographic
forms which are realised with different tonemes, e. g.,
sulten (‘the hunger’, toneme 1) versus sulten (‘hungry’,
toneme 2), and it is crucial that a speech synthesis sys-
tem is able to attribute the right tone to individual to-
kens of the lexeme, in this case by syntactic disambigua-
tion. Converting from text to speech, syntactic disam-
biguation is needed to distinguish between homographs
that differ both tonemically and segmentally, such as
the pair landet [lanE] (‘the country’, toneme 1) versus
landet [lanEt] (‘landed’, toneme 2). In fact, most neuter
nouns have such verbal homographic counterparts.
3.2.2 Challenges in written Norwegian
As regards the written language, the two official Nor-
wegian written standards differ significantly in spelling
and word formation, and in some parts of their vocab-
ulary and grammar. In practice, the bilingual require-
ment in administrative and educational institutions is
sometimes hard to meet, as people experience the differ-
ences as hard to learn. e effort to maintain this form
of bilingualism is very high and the need for proofread-
ing and for accurate translation between the two norms
is therefore apparent.
Older language resources need to be updated
for use in present day contexts.
Moreover, even within each written standard, consid-
erable variation is allowed in the form and inflection
of words. e word for ‘extinguish’ can for instance be
written as slukke or slokke in Bokmål (sløkke or sløkkje
in Nynorsk), while the past tenses in Bokmål can be
slukket, slukka, slokket or slokka. Although not all pos-
sible combinations of words and endings are always
used in practice, the combinatory possibilities are still
formidable, sometimes leading to thousands of possible
ways to write the same sentence. To complicate matters
further, the Norwegian writing system has not been sta-
ble, because a substantial series of spelling reforms have
been adopted throughout the years, which means that
older language resources need to be updated for use in
present day contexts.
As mentioned in the section on spoken particularities,
the Norwegian compounding system is a challenge to
any language technology because it requires good com-
pound analysers. One of the many challenges in machine
translation is the use of Norwegian reflexives, as in the
following sentence:
Per visste ikke at Kari hadde forsøkt å reparere bilen sin.
Per didn’t know that Kari had tried to fix her/*his car.
A correct translation requires the need for a Norwegian
deep grammatical analysis of this sentence.
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