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.
(23 Jan 2023) For the past 500 years, the National Library of Sweden has collected virtually every word published in Swedish, from priceless medieval manuscripts to present-day pizza menus.
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.
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