Natural Language Processing and Language Technologies for the Basque Language

The presence of a language in the digital domain is crucial for its survival, as online communication and digital language resources have become the standard in the last decades and will gain more importance in the coming years. In order to develop advanced systems that are considered the basics for an efficient digital communication (e.g. machine translation systems, text-to-speech and speech-to-text converters and digital assistants), it is necessary to digitalise linguistic resources and create tools. In the case of Basque, scholars have studied the creation of digital linguistic resources and the tools that allow the development of those systems for the last forty years. In this paper, we present an overview of the natural language processing and language technology resources developed for Basque, their impact in the process of making Basque a “digital language” and the applications and challenges in multilingual communication. More precisely, we present the well-known products for Basque, the basic tools and the resources that are behind the products we use every day. Likewise, we would like that this survey serves as a guide for other minority languages that are making their way to digitalisation. Received: 05 April 2022Accepted: 20 May 2022