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The Icelandic Language Biobank: Data Collection through a Clinical Analysis Platform

Paper · 2026 · Iris Nowenstein, Naizeth Núñez Macías, Gunnar Thor Örnólfsson et al.

Summary

Language technology for people with speech and language disorders is growing fast. It includes tools that detect and track conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or ALS, and communication aids such as personalized speech recognition. Nearly all of these tools exist only for English and a few other well-resourced languages. The authors address this gap for Icelandic, a low-to-medium resource language with about 400,000 speakers, where clinical corpora are scarce and patient groups are very small.

They describe the ongoing construction of the Icelandic Language Biobank (ILB). Unlike comparable high-resource initiatives, the ILB collects samples for both diagnosis/monitoring and AAC, so that scarce data is reused as much as possible. Most collection happens through ALDA, a web-based semi-automatic analysis platform co-designed with speech-language pathologists. Clinicians can check and correct its automatic output during routine practice.

The paper reports on infrastructure and argues a position rather than presenting evaluation results. Its main claim is that three things can offset data scarcity: clinician-led collection, linguistic expertise and longer, more varied samples. This makes it a useful template for other smaller language communities.

Key points

  • ILB is designed to serve two uses at once, diagnosis/monitoring and AAC. Single-purpose efforts in English, such as the Speech Accessibility Project and SpeechDx, focus on only one of these.
  • ALDA (Automatic Linguistic Data Analysis) is an SLP-oriented web platform. Its design responds to earlier findings that tools like Batchalign did not save clinicians time without user-friendly design and SLP involvement.
  • Small populations are a central obstacle: Iceland has only about 20–30 people living with ALS at any given time.
  • Reference points from high-resource languages:
    • The Speech Accessibility Project had gathered at least 1500 hours from more than 1000 participants as of February 2026.
    • SpeechDx is building a three-year longitudinal dataset in English, Spanish and Catalan.
    • TELL and Open Brain AI (15 languages) offer language-specific features mainly for larger languages.
  • The authors argue against the trend of shortening clinical samples to 1–5 minutes. They propose larger samples and data from wearables, mobile devices and typing to compensate for limited knowledge of clinically relevant features in Icelandic.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of IcelandReykjavik · Iceland5 works · 41 citations🎓Reykjavík UniversityReykjavik · Iceland2 works · 1 citation

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksMedicine · 241 worksPhysiology · 29 works

Cite

Cite as Iris Nowenstein, Naizeth Núñez Macías, Gunnar Thor Örnólfsson, Stefán Ólafsson, Bryndís Bergþórsdóttir, Iðunn Kristínardóttir and Hinrik Hafsteinsson. 2026. The Icelandic Language Biobank: Data Collection through a Clinical Analysis Platform. Proceedings of the Sixth Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric/developmental impairments in cooperation with the MENTAL.ai consortium.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/56ceuachi82w

@inproceedings{nowenstein2026icelandic,
  title = {{The Icelandic Language Biobank: Data Collection through a Clinical Analysis Platform}},
  author = {Iris Nowenstein, Naizeth Núñez Macías, Gunnar Thor Örnólfsson, Stefán Ólafsson, Bryndís Bergthórsdóttir, Idhunn Kristínardóttir and Hinrik Hafsteinsson},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric/developmental impairments in cooperation with the MENTAL.ai consortium},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/56ceuachi82w},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/56ceuachi82w}
}

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