The KBLab Blog

A datalab at the National Library of Sweden

Welcome KB-Whisper, a new fine-tuned Swedish Whisper model!
KBLab proudly presents KB-Whisper, a speech to text model fine-tuned using 50,000 hours of transcribed speech. This work reports an overall improvement across model sizes…
Leonora Vesterbacka, Faton Rekathati, Robin Kurtz, Justyna Sikora, Agnes Toftgård
Mar 7, 2025

Preserving the history of cultural heritage conservation
While KBLab uses modern heritage data to produce cutting edge AI models, we also work with developing the library’s research infrastructure for older heritage material and…
Chris Haffenden, Emil Stenback
Jan 31, 2025

Analysis of financial data at the Financial Supervisory Authority
A guest post from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen, FI), where FI describe how they use machine learning to analyze financial data and perform…
Jimmy Hollén
Jan 30, 2024

Unearthing forgotten images with the help of AI
How can new AI methods be used to improve the searchability and accessibility of visual heritage collections? We’ve taken advantage of the possibilities opened up by…
Chris Haffenden, Faton Rekathati, Emma Rende
Oct 20, 2023

Words unboxed: discovering new words with Kubord
KBLab together with Språkbanken Text have developed 75 freely available datasets to support research in, but not limited to, lexicography. The datasets, marked as Kubord 2…
Markus Forsberg, Justyna Sikora, Emma Sköldberg
Aug 29, 2023

For how long is a person recognisable by their voice?
Searching a database of speakers by their voice presents a unique challenge, as speakers’ voices change as they age. We can represent a speaker’s voice computationally with…
Maya Nachesa
Jul 4, 2023

A robust, multi-label sentiment classifier for Swedish
KBLab presents a robust, multi-label sentiment classifier trained on Swedish texts. The model is robust in the sense that it is trained on multiple datasets of different…
Hillevi Hägglöf
Jun 16, 2023

Swedish speech synthesis
KBLab releases a neural network based text-to-speech model for Swedish. The model was trained on an open Swedish speech synthesis dataset from NST. We make our latest…
Faton Rekathati
May 24, 2023

Scientific discourse with BERTopic
We describe a typical topic modeling use case where BERTopic is applied to scientific abstracts in the research field of education. We discuss the limitations of BERTopic…
Hillevi Hägglöf, Justyna Sikora
Mar 30, 2023

RixVox: A Swedish Speech Corpus with 5500 Hours of Speech from Parliamentary Debates
KBLab releases RixVox, a speech dataset comprised of 5500 hours of speech from parliamentary debates. The speeches have been aligned with transcripts from written protocols…
Faton Rekathati
Mar 9, 2023

Finding Speeches in the Riksdag’s Debates
The Riksdag is the Parliament of Sweden. It has made available twenty years of parliamentary debates through its website and open data platform. Each speech is accompanied…
Faton Rekathati
Feb 23, 2023

Swedish zero-shot classification model

KBlab has released a BERT model fine-tuned on NLI tasks, which can be used for zero-shot text classification.

Justyna Sikora
Feb 13, 2023

Swedish Sentence Transformer 2.0
KBLab’s Swedish sentence transformer has been updated to a newer version. The new version features an increased maximum sequence length of 384 tokens, allowing users to…
Faton Rekathati
Jan 16, 2023

BERTopic for Swedish: Topic modeling made easier via KB-BERT
Topic modeling is an exciting option for exploring and finding patterns in large volumes of text data. While this previously required considerable programming skills, a…
Elena Fano, Chris Haffenden
Jun 14, 2022

Evaluating Swedish Language Models
We present OverLim, a new benchmark for evaluating large language models for Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, created by translating a subset of the GLUE and SuperGLUE…
Robin Kurtz
Mar 16, 2022

Swedish Bootleg model
We at KBLab have trained a Swedish version of an entity disambiguation model called Bootleg, developed by the Hazy Research Lab at Stanford. The model is trained on Swedish…
Elena Fano
Mar 3, 2022

SUCX 3.0 - NER
We present a remix of the venerable SUC 3.0 dataset for Swedish Named Entity Recognition (NER), and explore the effect of Hyper Parameter Optimization (HPO) for this task…
Robin Kurtz, Joey Öhman
Feb 7, 2022

KBLab publishes an article about AI in the library in C&RL
What does AI mean for libraries and how could libraries pave the way for ethical AI? KBLab reflects on these questions in an article in the Open Access journal College &…
Elena Fano, Chris Haffenden
Jan 24, 2022
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