Sweden's National Library begins a new chapter

The library is training state-of-the-art AI models on a half-millennium of Swedish text to support humanities research in history, linguistics, media studies and more.

  • Wednesday, 25th January 2023 Posted 3 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Thanks to a centuries-old law that requires a copy of everything published in Swedish to be submitted to the library — also known as Kungliga biblioteket, or KB — its collections span from the obvious to the obscure: books, newspapers, radio and TV broadcasts, internet content, Ph.D. dissertations, postcards, menus and video games. It’s a wildly diverse collection of nearly 26 petabytes of data, ideal for training state-of-the-art AI.

 

“We can build state-of-the-art AI models for the Swedish language since we have the best data,” said Love Börjeson, director of KBLab, the library’s data lab.

Using NVIDIA DGX systems, the group has developed more than two dozen open-source transformer models, available on Hugging Face. The models, downloaded by up to 200,000 developers per month, enable research at the library and other academic institutions.

“Before our lab was created, researchers couldn’t access a dataset at the library — they’d have to look at a single object at a time,” Börjeson said. “There was a need for the library to create datasets that enabled researchers to conduct quantity-oriented research.”

With this, researchers will soon be able to create hyper-specialized datasets — for example, pulling up every Swedish postcard that depicts a church, every text written in a particular style or every mention of a historical figure across books, newspaper articles and TV broadcasts.


An examination of how Atlassian’s Rovo and Teamwork Graph introduce AI-driven automation into...
Check Point introduces its Agentic Network Security Orchestration Platform, designed to support...
Check Point’s 2026 report highlights the widening gap between AI-driven advancements and...
An independent evaluation of Atsign’s platform highlights an approach to building AI agents...
WatchGuard has launched Rai, an AI-based solution designed to support MSP security operations. Rai...
Addressing AI-related risks is becoming increasingly important as organisations adopt intelligent...
AI is reshaping the cybersecurity skills landscape, with a shift towards integrated training models...
Alteryx has introduced new automation capabilities designed to support AI deployment and integrate...