Newsletter of the Language Bank of Finland 2/2024

Suomeksi

Researchers of the Month in 2024

  1. Liisa Mustanoja – sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, spoken language of Tampere
  2. Tanja Säily – variation and change in the English language, historical corpus linguistics
  3. Harri Uusitalo – historical linguistics, ecolinguistics
  4. Lotta Leiwo – folkloristics, the T-Bone Slim Corpus
  5. Juraj Šimko – phonetics, speech synthesis
  6. Krister Lindén – The Language Bank of Finland (100th researcher profile)
  7. Heidi Niva – Finnish grammatical phenomena, Vepsian-Finnish dictionary
  8. Tuukka Törö – Finnish speech synthesis
  9. Aku Rouhe – speech recognition, fine-tuning LLMs
  10. Elina Vaahensalo – qualitative research on online discussions
  11. Katri Hiovain-Asikainen – speech technology for Sámi languages
  12. Sofoklis Kakouros – speech prosody

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/

New, updated or extended corpora in 2024

Suomi24 Corpus update on the way

The update to the Suomi24 Corpus, including forum posts from the years 2021-2023, is currently in preparation. We expect to make the Korp version and the downloadable VRT version available during February-March 2025.

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 or updated tools in 2024

Korp has moved to a new server

The Korp service of the Language Bank of Finland was moved to a new server on 12 November 2024. Korp also got a few minor fixes and changes. Read more…

The Language Bank of Finland participates in piloting the Language Data Space

The European Language Data Space (abbreviated LDS) is an ecosystem for the sharing and commercialisation of language data, such as text and speech data. The LDS is now entering the pilot phase, where the Language Bank of Finland is also actively involved. Read more…

Courses and training materials

The online course Corpus Linguistics and Statistical Methods (5 ECTS) will be offered again on 13.1.–28.2.2025. This online course is open to students from all universities, even outside Finland.

Recent events

Latest news from the FIN-CLARIAH research infrastructure

The Research Council of Finland has included FIN-CLARIAH in Finland’s national roadmap for research infrastructures 2025–2028. The work done within FIN-CLARIAH during the year 2024 is showcased here.

In November, a FIN-CLARIAH meeting was organized in Turku to discuss metadata. Read the wrap-up of the event on the DARIAH-FI blog.

The workshop ”LLMs and Speech-Centric AI” brought together experts from different fields

The workshop ”LLMs and Speech-Centric AI” was organized by the University of Helsinki, Kites ry and the LAREINA project in October 2024, bringing together experts from the Finnish industry, public administration and research to discuss the opportunities of large language models and speech technology in public and private sector organisations. Information about similar upcoming workshops will be shared via the LAREINA project.

The Donate Speech (Lahjoita puhetta) campaign at the Citizen Science event

In the Donate Speech campaign, which ran from 2020 to 2024, a large and diverse corpus of Finnish-language speech was collected in order to be used by both researchers and businesses. Together with researchers, the Language Bank of Finland participated in the Studia Generalia ”Citizen Science” event organised at the University of Helsinki on 30 October 2024, showcasing the ongoing research and development based on the Donate Speech corpus. The data has been used, for instance, to develop automatic speech recognition at Aalto University and speech synthesis at the University of Helsinki.

FIN-CLARIAH workshop ”Tools to Make Sense of Web Data” at the DRDHum 2024 conference

The third-ever Digital Research Data and Human Sciences (DRDHum) conference was held at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu, Finland, from 10-12 December 2024. As a satellite event to the regular conference programme, a workshop was organized by FIN-CLARIAH, introducing the tools and services developed in the FIN-CLARIAH project that are especially suitable for studying data collected from the web. Read more on the DARIAH-FI blog

FIN-CLARIAH Roadshow

The FIN-CLARIAH project will be presented in different locations through a series of roadshow events where you can learn more about current research, methods, tools and services in the humanities and social sciences. Of course, the Language Bank of Finland will also be there! The next event is to be held in March 2025 at the University of Vaasa. More information about the roadshow events will be updated on the Language Bank website.

CLARIN funding opportunities

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 Language Bank Of Finland is on vacation during 23.12.2024–6.1.2025

We wish you a relaxing holiday season!

Mietta Lennes and Wilhelmina Dyster
Project Planners
fin-clarin@helsinki.fi

 


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