Sweden's National Library begins a new chapter

The library is training state-of-the-art AI models on a half-millennium of Swedish text to support humanities research in history, linguistics, media studies and more.

  • Wednesday, 25th January 2023 Posted 3 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Thanks to a centuries-old law that requires a copy of everything published in Swedish to be submitted to the library — also known as Kungliga biblioteket, or KB — its collections span from the obvious to the obscure: books, newspapers, radio and TV broadcasts, internet content, Ph.D. dissertations, postcards, menus and video games. It’s a wildly diverse collection of nearly 26 petabytes of data, ideal for training state-of-the-art AI.

 

“We can build state-of-the-art AI models for the Swedish language since we have the best data,” said Love Börjeson, director of KBLab, the library’s data lab.

Using NVIDIA DGX systems, the group has developed more than two dozen open-source transformer models, available on Hugging Face. The models, downloaded by up to 200,000 developers per month, enable research at the library and other academic institutions.

“Before our lab was created, researchers couldn’t access a dataset at the library — they’d have to look at a single object at a time,” Börjeson said. “There was a need for the library to create datasets that enabled researchers to conduct quantity-oriented research.”

With this, researchers will soon be able to create hyper-specialized datasets — for example, pulling up every Swedish postcard that depicts a church, every text written in a particular style or every mention of a historical figure across books, newspaper articles and TV broadcasts.


An examination of how Atlassian’s Rovo and Teamwork Graph introduce AI-driven automation into...
METRO AG has completed a data centre migration programme delivered by Wipro Limited, moving from...
Jamf survey highlights emerging challenges as AI adoption deepens across organisations,...
Smartsheet integrates AI capabilities with major platforms, supporting enterprise teams in work...
Daon secures AI management certification, aiming to strengthen trust in digital identity and fraud...
Vusion and JYSK enhance their collaboration, moving towards a cloud-based platform for store...
Smartsheet extends its AI integrations, offering enterprise teams new capabilities with Smart...
NetApp and Cisco introduce updated solutions with FlexPod, aiming to empower enterprises in...