In the Language Bank: Veronika Laippala

Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Veronika Laippala tells us about her research on large language resources and computational methods.

Who are you?

My name is Veronika Laippala. I am a Professor of Digital Language Research at the and the research group.

What is your research topic?

Most of my research is related to language use in one way or another: to large language resources, mostly compiled from the Internet, and to computational methods to analyze the data. In addition, I have been involved in the development of Finnish language technology, including resources such as the and the named entity recognition system.

We have currently several on-going projects where we process large web-based language resources by analyzing the genres or registers found in them and by developing machine learning methods that can automatically recognize the different registers. Such methods and tools would benefit both Internet users in general and researchers using Internet-based language materials.

How is your research related to Kielipankki?

The wide selection of corpora and resources in the Language Bank of Finland provides huge opportunities! The corpus is quite unique in its scope and it is probably the resource I have used the most. In addition, the syntactic parser developed on the basis of our tree bank is used to parse the corpora in Kielipankki. Naturally, I also teach the use of the in my courses.

Publications related to Kielipankki

Liina Repo, Valtteri Skantsi, Samuel Rönnqvist, Saara Hellström, Miika Oinonen, Anna Salmela, Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert, Sampo Pyysalo & Veronika Laippala (2021). . Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pp. 183–191.

Veronika Laippala, Jesse Egbert, Douglas Biber & Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen (2021). . Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. 55, pp. 757–788.

More information on the aforementioned resources in Kielipankki

The  consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources.  is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.