Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3297–3301 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC World Class Language Technology - The Process of developing a Language Technology Strategy for Danish Sabine Kirchmeier1, Philip Diderichsen2, Peter Juel Henrichsen3, Sanni Nimb4, Bolette S. Pedersen2 1Kirchmeier.dk, 2Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, 3Danish Language Council 3Society for Danish Language and Literature, [email protected], 2{cph, bspedersen}@hum.ku.dk, [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Although Denmark is one of the most digitized countries in Europe, no coordinated efforts have been made in recent years to support the Danish language regarding language technology and artificial intelligence. In March 2019, however, the Danish government adopted a new, ambitious strategy for LT and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we describe the process behind the development of the language- related parts of the strategy: A Danish Language Technology Committee was constituted and a comprehensive series of workshops were organised in which users, suppliers, developers, and researchers gave their valuable input based on their experiences. We describe how, based on this experience, the focus areas and recommendations for the LT strategy were established, and which steps are currently taken in order to put the strategy into practice. Keywords: Danish, language strategy, language policy reductions - which foreigners often experience as 1. LT in Denmark mumbling. This makes the Danish language difficult to understand and produce – not least for speech technology Denmark is one of the most highly digitised societies in applications. Europe. Several ambitious governmental IT strategies during the last ten years have led to the digitization of most Over the years, a number of language databases and tools processes in the public space. (Digital Strategy 2016-2020). for Danish have been created based on public and private All citizens have a digital secure login to public services initiatives, but the linguistic resources for Danish are still and other services. All citizens and companies are obliged somewhat scattered and efforts have not been sufficiently to regularly consult their government-provided virtual coordinated. In particular, insufficient attention has been mailbox (the so-called e-Boks, cf. eboks.dk) while paper- paid to the fact that these building blocks, often costly to based correspondence is no longer supported by the public produce, generally need upscaling, validation, and sector. Schools are obliged to provide educational services maintenance, and last but not least that they should be made online, and all public service providers must serve the freely available. This means that many data sets are limited citizens via online interfaces. Central recommendations or not available at all. have been made for the development of IT systems for state institutions. Here, the development of clear terminology Speech technology is currently the most discussed and semantic descriptions of metadata and content play a technology. There are a few international and Danish crucial role. technology providers, but most of them are based on Nuance proprietary technology, and there are no freely However, governmental initiatives for artificial available speech corpora of sufficient size and quality for intelligence and especially for LT have been rather scarce. developing state-of-the-art speech recognizers and In the META NET white papers (Pedersen et al. 2012), synthetic voices. Danish was among the lowest ranked languages in Europe, and even much smaller language communities such as Machine translation is supplied by international providers Iceland and Latvia have invested more in LT in recent such as Microsoft and Google, and no Danish MT provider years. has been entering the market so far. A Danish FrameNet, a semantically annotated corpus, a This is mainly due to five factors: Danish wordnet and several other datasets, wordlists, 1. The lack of freely available linguistic resources corpora and tools exist (for details, see sprogtek2018). 2. The specific characteristics of the Danish language Common for many of these collections, however, is the fact 3. The small size of Denmark, both as a language that they are neither complete nor validated to a sufficient community and as a market (5.8 mill. citizens). degree since they are typically developed under projects 4. Lack of coordination in the development, distribution with limited budget and duration. and use of Danish LT 5. Too modest investment in research and training in Only a few smaller companies offer tailored services such Danish LT in recent years. as semantic search, taxonomy based indexation and the development of chat bot services. 2. Existing LT for Danish Danish differs markedly from English both in the way 3. Developments in Knowledge Modelling, words and sentences are formed, and in the way, words are Terminology and Public IT Architecture pronounced. Danish is exceptionally vowel rich (it has In a highly digitized society, the need for consistent IT three times more vowels than English in IPA-counting). systems that smoothly support human workflows, for Danish pronunciation is characterized by a lot of phonetic instance in relation to electronic patient records or the 3297 document management systems of municipalities, is of During 2015, the Danish Language Council published a vital importance. number of articles explaining the principles behind a number of LT applications such as spell checkers, speech Over the years, thousands of public IT systems have been recognition, MT and concept modelling in relation to developed, but they are not communicating in a common terminology (Diderichsen 2015-1; Diderichsen & Kirkedal language, and there has not previously been a common 2015; Diderichsen 2015-2; Diderichsen 2016; Madsen & public plan for how IT systems securely and efficiently can Hoffmann 2016). Together with leading researchers in the exchange data and become part of a coherent process. field, another article was published in the newspapers illustrating the problems that Denmark would face, if no Therefore, the government, municipalities and regions measures were taken to improve Danish LT (Diderichsen have agreed that, as part of the public digitization strategy et al. 2016). for 2016-20, a common public architecture for secure and efficient data sharing and the development of processes that This led to a new proposal in parliament by the Danish connect public services must be established. People’s Party in 2016: to establish a Danish language A number of general principles have been developed that committee. The proposal was well received, but not all publicly funded IT projects must adhere to: immediately accepted. Instead, it was decided to call a public hearing about LT in the parliaments committee of 1. IT architecture must be managed at the right level culture in the beginning of 2017. This hearing, finally, led according to a common framework to the establishment of a language technology committee 2. IT architecture must promote coherence, innovation under the Ministry of Culture led by the Danish Language and efficiency Council in the beginning of 2018. 3. IT architecture and legal provisions must support each other 5. The Work of the Danish Language 4. Security, privacy and trust must be ensured Technology Committee 5. Processes must be optimized across different fields 6. Good data must be shared and reused 5.1 Organisation and Composition 7. IT solutions must collaborate effectively The Language Technology Committee was established by 8. Data and services must be delivered reliably. the Minister of Culture and organised by the Danish Language Council. The work started on January 1st 2018. In particular, principles 3 and 6 point to the need to create The purpose of the committee was to clarify the a common language and a clear understanding of concepts perspectives and challenges of LT in a Danish context and and the importance of data sharing. A uniform and to produce a set of recommendations on how to stimulate consistent description of concepts, both in legislation and research and development in Danish LT as used in artificial IT architecture, is a cornerstone of the Danish IT intelligence, teaching, public services, and related areas. architecture principles emphasising the need for a closer The committee was also required to investigate the integration of terminology, concept modelling and perspectives for a national term bank. semantic description in the public sector. The committee consisted of 14 members representing 4. Academic and Political Initiatives to promote LT Large international IT companies (IBM and Google), Danish LT companies (Ankiro, Dictus, MIRSK and Over the last 10 years, several academic and political Unsilo) initiatives were taken in order to promote LT for Danish. User representatives (the municipalities of Odense and Already in 2009, the Danish Language Committee under Ballerup) the Minister of Culture stressed the need for more research Researchers and language resource developers (the into and development of LT in its report Sprog til tiden Centre for Language Technology at Copenhagen (2009). University, the DANTERM Centre at Copenhagen Even more strongly, the report of the Danish Language Business School and the Danish Society for Language Council, on the status of