We present the Spontal database of spontaneous Swedish dialogues. 120 dialogues of at least 30 minutes each have been captured in high-quality audio, high-resolution video and with a motion capture system. The corpus is currently being processed and annotated, and will be made available for research at the end of the project.

Language resources and tools to create and process these resources are necessary components in human language technology and natural language applications. In this paper, we describe a survey of existing language resources for Swedish, and the need for Swedish language resources to be used in research and real-world applications in language technology as well as in linguistic research. The survey is based on a questionnaire sent to industry and academia, institutions and organizations, and to experts involved in the development of Swedish language resources in Sweden, the Nordic countries and world-wide.