Icelandic lexicography has its origins in the seventeenth century, but the first monolingual Icelandic dictionary was not published until 1963. The complexities of Icelandic grammar impose certain demands in lexicography, as the morphology is rich and irregular, and case assignment of verbs calls for an exact description of argument structure. These demands cannot be met to a satisfactory degree in printed dictionaries, but the advent of online dictionaries has opened up new possibilities. In the past years, the building of a lexicographic macrostructure has undergone changes, introducing multi-word lemmas to a much larger degree than previously possible. Current Icelandic lexicographic work is supported by four major corpora, and a range of other digital resources for the language, but still more are needed. The Icelandic language community is tiny, but through the combined efforts and co-operation of lexicographers and the language technology community, the future seems to be in context-sensitive lexicography, to the benefit of both those groups and, hopefully, also the language community at large.
A study of the results of PISA 2003 in Iceland showed that pupils in the two largest schools did was significantly better than in smaller schools. The score was particularly low in schools with 11-25 participants in PISA. A study of the PISA 2003 score in Denmark also showed better results in larger schools than in smaller ones. When the results of PISA 2012 in Iceland were published, the Educational Testing Institute of Iceland was asked to classify the results into four categories based on school size. The results in the largest schools turned out to be significantly better than in smaller schools. A questionnaire was sent to a selection of schools in each category, omitting the category of the smallest schools. In the questionnaire mathematics teachers were asked questions on their education, proportion of their work in teaching mathematics, experience in teaching mathematics in lower secondary school and material used. The results indicated that full-time work in mathematics teaching, many years of teaching mathematics and in particular continuity in teaching i.e. teachers' experience in teaching the same group and the same material for many years leads to better performance.
Lemmatization, finding the basic morphological form of a word in a corpus, is an important step in many natural language processing tasks when working with morphologically rich languages. We describe and evaluate Nefnir, a new open source lemmatizer for Icelandic. Nefnir uses suffix substitution rules, derived from a large morphological database, to lemmatize tagged text. Evaluation shows that for correctly tagged text, Nefnir obtains an accuracy of 99.55%, and for text tagged with a PoS tagger, the accuracy obtained is 96.88%.
In the Meran Program in 1905 and at the Royaumont Seminar in 1959, among the main themes were transformation geometry, including motion geometry, and group theory. Those themes entered some Danish mathematics textbooks and the English School Mathematics Project’s textbook series, both used in Iceland around 1970. One of the arguments for including group theory in school mathematics was that its structure corresponded to structures in the minds of children. Eventually, the emphasis on motion in geometry subordinated the structure of the transformation groups. These ideas proved short-lived in Iceland, they coincided with a great expansion of the school system, students were unaccustomed to studying textbooks in English, available teachers were not receptive, and mathematical analysis was considered neglected. In later applications, geometric transformations have become the basis of a large industry: animations in motion pictures and games. Keywords: motion geometry, transformation, group theory, School Mathematics Project
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.