In the budget bill for 2010, The National Library was commissioned to establish a Norwegian language technology resource collection (Språkbanken), and to begin the collection and development of the language resources to be included in it. Språkbanken is a technological infrastructure consisting of digital language resources for use in the development of ICT-based technology that supports the handling of linguistic data.
Språkbanken is a service to the industry working with the development of language-based ICT, to researchers within linguistics and language technology, and to public enterprises developing electronic solutions for public services.
Språkbanken will contain text and spoken language corpora, i.e. large collections of text and speech in machine-readable format. In some cases, these corpora will be stored in several versions, with varying degrees of mark-up, such as phonetic transcription, part-of-speech tagging, syntactic structure, semantic relations, etc. Individual user needs will determine which degree of mark-up is required. Furthermore, Språkbanken will contain databases, e.g. a lexical database, as well as applications for the handling of electronic text and speech.
The National Library will build up and structure the content of Språkbanken gradually. Initially we will incorporate and further develop some central, already existing resources, and prioritise between projects that require further development. As a result, it will take some time until Språkbanken is running as intended.
