It’s Basically the Same Language Anyway: the Case for a Nordic Language Model

Abstract

When is it beneficial for a research community to organize a broader collaborative effort on a topic, and when should we instead promote individual efforts? In this opinion piece, we argue that we are at a stage in the development of large-scale language models where a collaborative effort is desirable, despite the fact that the preconditions for making individual contributions have never been better. We consider a number of arguments for collaboratively developing a large-scale Nordic language model, include environmental considerations, cost, data availability, language typology, cultural similarity, and transparency. Our primary goal is to raise awareness and foster a discussion about our potential impact and responsibility as NLP community.

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