Lexicography for IBM - Developing Norwegian Linguistic Resources in the 1980s

In 1984, IBM and the University of Oslo set up a joint project, probably the first project of its kind in Norway. Its aim was to develop Norwegian language resources for IBM application software – for PCs, midrange computers, and mainframes. The primary objective: to create a “base dictionary” module that would drive language sensitive functions. The technology was based on simple character sequence recognition; its great asset being high compaction and rapid access to correct data. The module was to be built on documented linguistic forms. The dictionary should cover the general part of the vocabulary, and a broad coverage module was created for Norwegian Bokmål. Later, one module for Nynorsk was developed as well. At that stage, however, the project had become a regular IBM project. In the following years, other linguistic functions were added and eventually, the result served as the foundation for a grammar and for machine translation. The project was terminated because of the corporate financial crisis of the late 1980s. Later, the dictionaries were transferred to the University of Oslo. They are now an integral part of the basic infrastructure for Norwegian academic computational linguistics.