Creating language technology based on language data has become very popular with the recent advances of large language models and neural network technologies. This makes language resources very valuable, and especially in case of indigenous languages, the scarce resources are even more precious. Given the good results of simply fetching everything you can from the internet and feeding it to neural networks in English, there has been more work on doing the same for all languages. However, indigenous language resources as they are on the web are not comparable in that they would encode the most recent normativised language in all its aspects. This problematic is further due to not understanding the texts input to models or output by models by the people who work on them. Corpora also have intelligent property rights and copyrights that are not respected. Furthermore, the web is filled with the result of language model -generated texts. In this article we describe an ethical and sustainable way to work with indigenous languages.

Many errors in Faroese writing are linked to the letter ð, a letter which has no corresponding phoneme, and is always omitted intervocally and wordfinally after a vowel. It plays an important role in the written language, disambiguating homophone but not homograph forms like infinitive kasta ‘throw’ from its participle kastað. Since adding a hypercorrect ð or erroneously omitting it often results in an existing word, these errors cannot be captured by ordinary spellcheckers. The article presents a grammar checker targeting ð errors, and discusses challenges related to false alarms.

We present GramDivvun, the first Inari Saami grammar checker for L2 users. The grammar checker is an important tool in the revitalisation of the language, in particular for strengthening the literary language. As the Inari Saami language community needs language tools predominantly for language learners, the focus is on grammatical interference errors made by (mostly Finnish-speaking) learners. Six of these errors are featured in the first version of the grammar checker. For non-proofread text written by inexperienced writers, precision is good, 73%. With experienced text and proofread text, alarms are rare but precision considerably lower, 19.5 % on average, but varying considerably between the error types. The paper discusses reasons for this variation. Future plans are improving results by means of increased testing, especially for complex sentences, and eventually also including more error types.

Machine learning (ML) approaches have dominated NLP during the last two decades. From machine translation and speech technology, ML tools are now also in use for spellchecking and grammar checking, with a blurry distinction between the two. We unmask the myth of effortless big data by illuminating the efforts and time that lay behind building a multi-purpose corpus with regard to collecting, mark-up and building from scratch. We also discuss what kind of language technology minority languages actually need, and to what extent the dominating paradigm has been able to deliver these tools. In this context we present our alternative to corpus-based language technology, which is knowledge-based language technology, and we show how this approach can provide language technology solutions for languages being outside the reach of machine learning procedures. We present a stable and mature infrastructure (GiellaLT) containing more than hundred languages and building a number of language technology tools that are useful for language communities.

Grammatical approaches to language technology are often considered less optimal than statistical approaches in multilingual settings, where large-scale portability becomes an important issue. The present paper argues that there is a notable gain in reusing grammatical resources when porting technology to new languages. The pivot language is North Sámi, and the paper discusses portability with respect to the closely related Lule and South Sámi, and to the unrelated Faroese and Greenlandic languages.

We describe the development of a two-way shallow-transfer machine translation system between Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokma ̊l built on the Apertium platform, using the Free and Open Source resources Norsk Ordbank and the Oslo–Bergen Constraint Grammar tagger. We detail the integration of these and other resources in the system along with the construction of the lexical and structural transfer, and evaluate the translation quality in comparison with another system. Finally, some future work is suggested.