Automatic Lemmatisation for Norwegian

Ahmet Yildirim, Kristin Hagen, Dag Haug


Abstract
We report on a new lemmatisation system for Norwegian, which is a particularly challenging language with two written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, that both have a lot of optionality. Our system covers both varieties and consists of a neural model that classifies words into rewrite rule classes that produce their lemma, as well as a large-scale computational lexicon of Norwegian that gives all possible inflections of a large part of the Norwegian vocabulary. We test different ways of combining these components. When evaluated with pure string-matching against the lemmas in the gold data, all systems perform approximately at the same level (99.1-99.2% on Bokmål and 98.5-98.6% on Nynorsk), but detailed error analysis shows that the computational lexicon reduces the number of true errors by more than half (reaching 99.6% accuracy on Bokmål and 99.3% on Nynorsk), as opposed to “surface errors” like using a different, but equally acceptable spelling variant of the correct lemma.
Anthology ID:
2026.slide-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Erhard Hinrichs, Joakim Nivre, Petya Osenova, James Pustejovsky, Claus Zinn
Venues:
SLiDE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
93–103
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-slide-08
DOI:
10.63317/2cpfp5inka2c
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahmet Yildirim, Kristin Hagen, and Dag Haug. 2026. Automatic Lemmatisation for Norwegian. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE), pages 93–103, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Lemmatisation for Norwegian (Yildirim et al., SLiDE 2026)
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