IBM’s Norwegian grammar project, 1988–1991

Abstract

During the years 1988–1991, IBM Norway developed a broadcoverage grammar for Norwegian Bokmål as part of an international corporate effort to create writing tools for all platforms and for all major language communities where IBM had business at that time. The grammar was based on IBM’s own lexicon and morphology modules and a key factor of the technology was the programming language PLNLP. The main project halted in 1990 because of the world’s economic crisis. However, local development continued with a view to a different application: Machine translation between Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk. Unfortunately, even this project did not reach a natural conclusion for economic reasons. In addition to producing linguistic results, the project showed how difficult it is to rely on one unique source of corporate funding for a comprehensive long-term project. It also showed how a national subsidiary of an international corporation could not count on local public support.