Newsletter of the Language Bank of Finland

Researchers of the Month in 2021

1. Mats Fridlund – research related to digital history
2. Emmi Lahti – rhetoric and discourse studies
3. Heikki Rasilo – speech production and its learning mechanisms
4. Gwenaëlle Bauvois – research related to right-wing populism, countermedia, reinformation, hybrid media and post-truth
5. Mila Oiva – Cultural History
6. Karita Suomalainen – interactional linguistics
7. Olli Kuparinen – variation and change in spoken Finnish
8. Okko Räsänen – computational modeling of infant language development
9. Juho Leinonen – automatic speech recognition, speech alignment and chatbots
10. Veronika Laippala – large language resources and computational methods
11. Mikko Kurimo – automatic speech recognition
12. Jutta Salminen – expressing negation in Finnish

All previous researchers of the month can be found in the archive.

Do you know researchers who use the Language Bank of Finland and who might be good candidates for Researcher of the Month? Would you be one of them? Inform us: https://www.kielipankki.fi/support/contact-us/

Updates to resource-specific licenses and data protection terms and conditions

The resource-specific license terms and conditions will be updated in the near future. The most prominent change is that resource-specific data protection terms and conditions will be included in the licenses of those resources that contain personal data. Information about the license updates will be published on the Language Bank website. Read more about what to expect: https://www.kielipankki.fi/news/updates-to-resource-specific-licenses-and-data-protection-terms-and-conditions/

New corpora in 2021

• The extension of the Suomi24 Corpus (years 2018-2020)
• The Swedish sub-corpus of the Classics Library of the National Library of Finland
• Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Downloadable Version, May 2019
• Terminology Forum Glossaries (selection), source
• The Finnish sub-corpus of the Classics Library of the National Library of Finland – Kielipankki version
• Classics of English and American Literature as translated by Kersti Juva, English-Finnish parallel corpus, Korp
• The Downloadable Version of Classics of English and American Literature as translated by Kersti Juva, English-Finnish parallel corpus, scrambled
• Finnish OpenSubtitles 2017, VRT
• Route to A wing Corpus, Downloadable Version
• Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, VRT
• Helsinki Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (1540-1750), VRT
• Yle News Archive Easy-to-read Finnish 2019-2020, source material
• Yves Montand in the USSR interviews, source
• ANEE lexical portals of Akkadian
• Yle Finnish News Archive 2011-2018 and 2019-2020, downloadable versions
• Yle Swedish News Archive 2012-2018 and 2019-2020, downloadable versions
• Corpus of Old Church Slavonic Texts
• Iijoki collection in text and VRT format
• FinEst BERT
• Finnish News Agency Archive 1992-2018, CoNLL-U, source
• The Magazine Corpus of the Institute for the Languages of Finland
• Corpus of Translated Finnish
• An update to the E-thesis corpus
• FinnSentiment

Those corpora that were previously available via the LAT platform (discontinued in 2020) have been moved to the download service. The content of the downloadable corpora is essentially the same as in LAT, and the samples can be studied with, e.g., Praat or ELAN. At a later stage, we intend to make some speech corpora accessible via Korp as well. The current status and access location of each corpus can be seen on its metadata record and on the page of the resource group in question.

Would you like to offer your own resource to be distributed via Kielipankki?

Submit the basic details about your own resource to the Language Bank of Finland: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2021121421

New: Resource group pages

A given resource may be available as several different versions or variants that are provided for different purposes. The new resource group pages provide an overview of all the available versions. Read more

Korp will be updated soon

The official Korp update has been postponed until January. However, many of the new features and improvements can already be tested in Korplab. Your feedback is welcome! Read more

New Aalto-ASR module for automatic speech recognition and for aligning text with speech

The upgraded Aalto-ASR 2.1 is available for testing in the Puhti environment at CSC. If required, it is also possible to install the system on a local environment from a Docker container. Read more

Courses and awarded training materials

The online course Corpus Linguistics and Statistical Methods (5 ECTS) will be offered again in Jan-Mar 2021 and it can be taken either in Finnish or in English. The course is open to all universities and you can also participate in it from outside Finland. Course details

• All the open online courses offered by FIN-CLARIN: https://www.kielipankki.fi/support/training
• Courses listed the international Digital Humanities Course Registry: https://dhcr.clarin-dariah.eu/
• Training materials by CLARIN: https://www.clarin.eu/content/teaching-clarin#training-materials
• Teaching CLARIN Award: https://www.kielipankki.fi/news/2021-teaching-clarin-awards/

Apply for CLARIN funding

Did you know that CLARIN offers grants for, e.g., researcher and teacher mobility, events and training activities? Check out the funding opportunities and current calls: https://www.clarin.eu/funding

The Donate Speech campaign continues – Finnish and Finland-Swedish can be donated in parallel campaigns

The Donate Speech campaign (Lahjoita puhetta) is still on. You may now donate your speech in Swedish, too! Of the 4000 hours of Finnish speech that were donated so far, 1500 hours have been manually transcribed. Starting from spring 2022, the donated speech material will be made available for restricted research and development purposes via the Language Bank of Finland.

• Lahjoita Puhetta campaign page, for Finnish speech: https://yle.fi/aihe/lahjoita-puhetta
• Donera Prat campaign page, for Finland-Swedish: http://svenska.yle.fi/doneraprat

Kielipankki  – The Language Bank of Finland, Yle (Finnish Broadcasting Company) and the Donate Speech campaign were awarded three times in 2021

• May 2021: The Donate Speech campaign receives the national Grand One media prize in the Best Mobile Service category (English news by FCAI): https://fcai.fi/news/2021/5/28/toward-better-speech-recognition-lahjoita-puhetta-campaign-wins-prize-as-best-mobile-service
• October 2021: Donate Speech awarded with PRIX EUROPA: https://www.kielipankki.fi/news/donate-speech-prix-europa-2021/
• October 2021: University of Helsinki Open Science Award granted to the Language Bank of Finland and Donate Speech: https://www.kielipankki.fi/news/university-of-helsinki-open-science-award-2021-to-kielipankki-and-donate-speech/

The new FIN-CLARIAH infrastructure receives funding from the Academy of Finland

FIN-CLARIAH, the national research infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities in Finland was granted 4.6 M€ by the Academy of Finland for the years 2022-23. FIN-CLARIAH consists of two components, FIN-CLARIN and DARIAH-FI.

Read more about FIN-CLARIN: FIN-CLARIN
Read more about DARIAH-FI: DARIAH-FI
For the roadmap of FIN-CLARIAH, see also: FIN-CLARIAH

The Language Bank of Finland wishes you nice and relaxing Christmas time!

Mietta Lennes
Projet Planning Officer
fin-clarin@helsinki.fi

 

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See also the CLARIN Newsflash: https://www.clarin.eu/content/newsflash