Adapting an I celandic morphological database to F aroese (2023)

Abstract: This paper describes the adaptation of the database system developed for the Database of Icelandic Morphology (DIM) to the Faroese language and the creation of the Faroese Morphological Database using that system from lexicographical data collected for a Faroese spellchecker project.

## introduction the faroese morphological database (fmd) foot_0 is the result of a joint project of the árni magnússon institute for icelandic studies and the university of the faroe islands. the project, entitled the insular nordic morphological database project, received funding from the nordplus nordic languages programme in 2021. the fmd consists of entries for faroese words (lexemes) with complete paradigms, including variants. various kinds of metadata are included. it is based on a previously existing project in iceland, the database of icelandic morphology (bjarnadóttir et al., 2019), @xcite and makes use of language data collected for a previous faroeselanguage project, the spellchecker raettstavarin. @xcite data from dim is used in countless language technology projects in iceland, including smart search engines, spellchecking and hyphenation tools, taggers and parsers, speech recognition tools, online word games, and dim is also a popular online resource for the general public. it is hoped that the new faroese sister project will grow to be as successful in spurring the development of language technology in the faroe islands and aiding the general public, researchers and language students in the use and study of the faroese language. ## linguistic similarity faroese and icelandic are closely related, both being north germanic languages of the west scandinavian branch and share many features such as three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, and the four-case system of nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. although the genitive is used much less in faroese than icelandic, it certainly exists and is morphologically similar. nouns have inherent gender, while adjectives and determiners inflect for gender. verbs inflect for mood, tense, person and number (thráinsson et al., 2012). a full list of inflectional categories will be provided on the fmd website, in the same manner as on the dim website. due to these similarities it was evident from the start that all the tools and methods that have been developed for dim could be applied to faroese with only minimal changes; even the web interface can be presented in much the same way, with faroese linguistic terms simply replacing the icelandic terms for e.g. singular, nominative, comparative, etc. at this initial stage of the project, the focus was on the main features of the system, though detailed tagging was employed for some particularly important or interesting morphological and pronunciation features. the database system for the fmd is run on a copy of the dim system. more or less the complete software system from dim has been set up for the fmd. the system includes the database backend, import tools, and website, with both online lookup and export functions for language technology projects. a detailed description of the system may be found on the dim website. @xcite 3 building the database the premise of the project was to make use of existing data, and by far the largest set of lexicographical data available was the data from raettstavarin. it, in turn, is largely derived from data from the electronic version of the faroese dictionary (poulsen, 1998; web version 2007, cur-rently available at sprotin.fo). another piece of low-hanging fruit was the official faroese language council list of given names. ## present state and future additions currently, the fmd contains over 73,000 entries. these include about 68,000 words added from the spellchecker word lists and about 3,000 more taken directly from the dictionary, either via dictionary data collected for the spellchecker project or manual lookup on the web, and 1,688 given names from the faroese language council's name list. several hundred words have been added from other sources such as web texts and other published texts, wiktionary @xcite . the number of individual inflected forms in the fmd is about 2.7 million and the number of distinct word forms, i.e. unique strings or types, is about 945,000. the fmd currently does not cover proper names well and lacks e.g. most place names, company names and surnames. many of these may be sourced from government lists, phone directories, etc. corpus data can provide further general vocabulary. the faroese text collection foot_8 (ftc) has been used as a rough gauge of the completeness of the fmd. although the ftc only has 1.1 million tokens, at this early stage in the development of the faroese morphological database it yields some interesting material. the ftc contains just over 71,000 unique word forms, excluding numbers, punctuation and symbols, and currently, 59% of these are already included in the fmd, having been sourced elsewhere. the ftc can continue to provide a means of evaluating the progress of the fmd, i.e. what proportion of unique tokens in the corpus are already in the database and whether the most frequent word forms in the corpus are included, as well as provide some additional vocabulary. however, a much larger text corpus (25.1 million tokens) is now available as part of the faroese blark 1.0, published in july 2022 by the ravnur project. @xcite an even larger faroese corpus, tagged and lemmatized, is in the planning stage, and that will presumably provide much new data as well. we expect that there will be a number of erroneous and nonstandard forms in the corpus data. these will be handled in a similar manner to the data in dim with a system of error analysis similar to the one described on the dim website. @xcite 5 conclusion dim has proven to be both a useful tool for icelandic language technology projects and a very popular resource for the general public. the hope is that the fmd will have a similar impact, both in language technology and as a general resource for faroese. in order for that to happen, the fmd needs to continue to expand and its scope needs to be enlarged. dim contains both descriptive and prescriptive data, with extensive grading and error analysis. these aspects are, as yet, not a part of the fmd, but hopefully the creation of a larger