A Common Danish Language Resource

With the initiative A Common Danish Language Resource, the aim is to collect, develop and share language data, language models and language tools that can support the development of Danish artificial intelligence solutions.

Based on the ‘National strategy for artificial intelligence’ from 2019, the ‘Digitisation pact’ sets to develop a common Danish Language resource. The initiative was later anchored in the Finance Agreement between Local Government Denmark, Danish Regions and the central government. The initiative runs in the period 2019-2026.

The purpose is to support Danish language technology companies in developing Danish-language solutions within artificial intelligence. The effort aims to gather relevant, existing language resources and make them freely available to all. It further aims to develop and give access to new language resources that can reduce barriers and strengthen the development of language technology solutions in Danish.

This is done by collaborating with both private companies, research institutions, and public sector actors. The focus on engaging as many actors as possible aims to catalyze the best conditions for developing Danish language technology fit to impact use cases across a wide spectrum of society. There is also a close collaboration with the EU organ ELRC (European Language Resource Coordination).

The European Language Resource Coordination

ELRC is an initiative to support the CEF Programme (Connecting Europe Facility), which provides a range of services to public administrations, helping them to prepare language resources for submission to the European Commission.

These services guarantee that the provided language resources will lead to higher quality machine translation systems in the eTranslation platform. ELRC shall catalyze the collection and publication of language resources, including in particular multilingual datasets, which aid in improving the quality of resources.

The collaboration with ELRC is valuable due to the Agency for Digital Governments role as a national anchor point in Denmark. The Agency participates in ELRC meetings, contributes to insights and experiences to the meetings, organize ELRC workshops and contributes with input to national analysis, e.g. the role of language technology in the national AI strategy.