NorEval: A Norwegian Language Understanding and Generation Evaluation Benchmark

This paper introduces NorEval, a new and comprehensive evaluation suite for large-scale standardized benchmarking of Norwegian generative language models (LMs). NorEval consists of 24 high-quality human-created datasets -- of which five are created from scratch. In contrast to existing benchmarks for Norwegian, NorEval covers a broad spectrum of task categories targeting Norwegian language understanding and generation, establishes human baselines, and focuses on both of the official written standards of the Norwegian language: Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk. All our datasets and a collection of over 100 human-written prompts are integrated into LM Evaluation Harness, ensuring flexible and reproducible evaluation. We describe the NorEval design and present the results of benchmarking 19 open-source pre-trained and instruction-tuned LMs for Norwegian in various scenarios. Our benchmark, evaluation framework, and annotation materials are publicly available.

Comparative analysis of optical character recognition methods for Sámi texts from the National Library of Norway

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is crucial to the National Library of Norway's (NLN) digitisation process as it converts scanned documents into machine-readable text. However, for the S\'ami documents in NLN's collection, the OCR accuracy is insufficient. Given that OCR quality affects downstream processes, evaluating and improving OCR for text written in S\'ami languages is necessary to make these resources accessible. To address this need, this work fine-tunes and evaluates three established OCR approaches, Transkribus, Tesseract and TrOCR, for transcribing S\'ami texts from NLN's collection. Our results show that Transkribus and TrOCR outperform Tesseract on this task, while Tesseract achieves superior performance on an out-of-domain dataset. Furthermore, we show that fine-tuning pre-trained models and supplementing manual annotations with machine annotations and synthetic text images can yield accurate OCR for S\'ami languages, even with a moderate amount of manually annotated data.

The Impact of Copyrighted Material on Large Language Models: A Norwegian Perspective

The use of copyrighted materials in training generative language models raises critical legal and ethical questions. This paper presents a framework for and the results of empirically assessing the impact of copyrighted materials on the performance of large language models (LLMs) for Norwegian. We found that both books and newspapers contribute positively when the models are evaluated on a diverse set of Norwegian benchmarks, while fiction works possibly lead to decreased performance. Our experiments could inform the creation of a compensation scheme for authors whose works contribute to AI development.