Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson Wins 2023 Steven Krauwer Award for CLARIN Achievements
Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson is a professor emeritus at the University of Iceland.
Reasons for Nomination
Over the past two decades, Rögnvaldsson has played a vital role in language technology in Iceland, actively working towards Icelandic being included in digital language developments.
Expertise and Contribution
Since 1998, Rögnvaldsson has taken part in many Nordic and European initiatives in the field of language technology. Rögnvaldsson was a key figure during the first Icelandic language technology programme (2000-2004), participating as either project leader or steering group member for many of the language technology projects during that period, such as the creation of an Icelandic Part-of-Speech tagger, speech recognition and TTS-systems for Icelandic. After the programme, Rögnvaldsson continued to advocate for Icelandic, emphasising the importance of language technology for the future of the language. He took part in several language technology and R&D projects, notably Viable Language Technology Beyond English, and continued to participate in many projects related to the creation of language technology tools, corpora and lexicons. In 2014, Rögnvaldsson’s group obtained a grant to compile the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus, which has recently been used in a wide range of language technology projects and linguistic research.
In 2014, Rögnvaldsson took part in founding the organisation Almannarómur, now renamed the Centre for Language Technology in Iceland, which carried out the official Language Technology Programme for Icelandic.
Rögnvaldsson has participated in various Nordic and European cooperation networks and projects in the field of language technology: Nordic CLARIN Network, NorDokNet, NLTNet, Nordisk Netordbog, and Tværsproglig søgning på tekster og ordbøger. He led the Icelandic participation in META-NORD, which was a joint project between the Nordic and Baltic countries and a part of META-NET.
In 2013-2014, Rögnvaldsson chaired the Icelandic committee which took part in organising LREC 2014 in Reykjavík and since 2015 he has been an Icelandic representative in LERC. In 2019-2021, Rögnvaldsson was representative for Iceland in ELG – European Language Grid, and for ELE - European Language Equality from 2020. In November 2018, Rögnvaldsson became the first National Coordinator for Iceland for CLARIN, a position he held until his retirement in October 2021.
Johan Frid Wins 2023 Steven Krauwer Award for CLARIN Achievements
Johan Frid is a researcher specialising in language technology at the Humanities Lab at Lund University in Sweden.
Reasons for Nomination
Frid has actively been contributing to the CLARIN infrastructure since the establishment of the Swedish node SWE-Clarin in 2015. In 2017, he became the coordinator and leading expert at the SWE-Clarin Knowledge Centre for Multimodal and Sensor-Based Data at the Humanities Laboratory, Lund University, where he is a central figure in contributing to its success. In this role, he has continuously been involved with a great number of infrastructure user groups from different disciplines and research areas. Specifically, he has played a role in developing and applying language technology tools and methods that can be used when exploring and analysing data in innovative ways. This has raised the scientific impact of several fields of investigation and led to many new funding opportunities.
Expertise and Contribution
With a background in linguistics and language engineering, Frid has made outstanding contributions to advancing research in a multitude of areas. He has guided and assisted researchers in analysing multimodal data in novel ways in order to be able to answer different kinds of complex research questions, and has been instrumental in developing visualisations and analyses of lexico-historical language data. He has built a reputation in conducting different kinds of lexical semantic analysis of data and correlating them with neurophysiological (EEG) data, in devising methods to investigate correlations between speech prosody and head and eyebrow movements, as well as conducting different kinds of text mining and extracting information from scientific articles in areas such as epidemiology. He is also involved in work on language documentation. Moreover, he has contributed to education and knowledge sharing by teaching many courses on the use of different language technology methods and tools.
The Award Ceremony
The award ceremony took place during the 2023 CLARIN Annual Conference, a hybrid event held in Leuven and online from 16 to 18 October.
The Steven Krauwer Award for CLARIN Achievements, named after CLARIN ’s first Executive Director, was initiated in 2017 and is awarded annually. Since 2021, multiple awards can be awarded to exceptional scientists or engineers in recognition of outstanding contributions towards CLARIN goals in the areas of language resource building, tools or services.