Freddy Wetjen

Javier de la Rosa, Rolv-Arild Braaten, Per Egil Kummervold et al.

In this paper, we present several baselines for automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for the two official written languages in Norway: Bokmål and Nynorsk. We compare the performance of models of varying sizes and pre-training approaches on multiple Norwegian speech datasets. Additionally, we measure the performance of these models against previous state-of-the-art ASR models, as well as on out-of-domain datasets. We improve the state of the art on the Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus (NPSC) from a word error rate (WER) of 17.10\% to 7.60\%, with models achieving 5.81\% for Bokmål and 11.54\% for Nynorsk. We also discuss the challenges and potential solutions for further improving ASR models for Norwegian.

Per E Kummervold, Javier de la Rosa, Freddy Wetjen et al.

This article introduces NB-Whisper, an adaptation of OpenAI's Whisper, specifically fine-tuned for Norwegian language Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We highlight its key contributions and summarise the results achieved in converting spoken Norwegian into written forms and translating other languages into Norwegian. We show that we are able to improve the Norwegian Bokmål transcription by OpenAI Whisper Large-v3 from a WER of 10.4 to 6.6 on the Fleurs Dataset and from 6.8 to 2.2 on the NST dataset.

Javier de la Rosa, Vladislav Mikhailov, Lemei Zhang et al.

The use of copyrighted materials in training language models raises critical legal and ethical questions. This paper presents a framework for and the results of empirically assessing the impact of publisher-controlled copyrighted corpora on the performance of generative large language models (LLMs) for Norwegian. When evaluated on a diverse set of tasks, we found that adding both books and newspapers to the data mixture of LLMs tend to improve their performance, while the addition of fiction works seems to be detrimental. Our experiments could inform the creation of a compensation scheme for authors whose works contribute to AI development.

Per E Kummervold, Javier de la Rosa, Freddy Wetjen et al.

In this work, we show the process of building a large-scale training set from digital and digitized collections at a national library. The resulting Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based language model for Norwegian outperforms multilingual BERT (mBERT) models in several token and sequence classification tasks for both Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk. Our model also improves the mBERT performance for other languages present in the corpus such as English, Swedish, and Danish. For languages not included in the corpus, the weights degrade moderately while keeping strong multilingual properties. Therefore, we show that building high-quality models within a memory institution using somewhat noisy optical character recognition (OCR) content is feasible, and we hope to pave the way for other memory institutions to follow.