The Icelandic Language Biobank opens in

The Icelandic Language Biobank is a project funded by the Strategic Research and Development Programme in Language Technology within the Icelandic Research Fund. It is directed by Iris Edda Nowenstein, Assistant Professor of Icelandic linguistics and language technology at the University of Iceland and speech-language pathologist at Landspítali (the National University Hospital of Iceland).

The overall goal of the project is to build the necessary infrastructure for clinical speech and language data collection in Iceland, an important step to ensure access to clinical language technology tool. This is done by leveraging collaboration with clinicians and robust linguistically-informed data collection against data scarcity. In contrast with the most comprehensive data collection efforts in high-resource languages, the Icelandic Language Biobank will contain language samples for communication aid development as well as the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders.