About me
Hæ! I am a computational linguist based in Reykjavík, Iceland. I'm currently employed as a researcher at the Árni Magnússon Institute
for Icelandic Studies and working towards a PhD in Icelandic linguistics at the University of Iceland. Previously, I
received my MA in Language Technology from Uppsala University in Sweden and worked on LT projects at Grammatek, a private company in Iceland.
My research interests lie at the intersection of linguistics and language technology/artificial intelligence. At the moment, I'm primarily interested in investigating language acquisition, syntactic and semantic structures in deep learning and what the
study of one can tell us about the other. I was one of the authors of the first linguistic benchmark for Icelandic-language LLMs (see below) and I've also worked on several different NLP applications such as grapheme-to-phoneme transcription,
machine translation and question answering.
Contact me at bjarki.armannsson@arnastofnun.is. I also post about linguistics and language technology on my Substack, Bjarkamál (in Icelandic).
Selected Work
Conference and Journal Papers
-
Bjarki Ármannsson, Finnur Ágúst Ingimundarson, Iris Edda Nowenstein and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson. 2026. Icelandic Gender Agreement Shows LLMs' Failure to Effectively Generalize. Accepted to
Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 32.1: Proceedings of PLC 49 (PWPL 32.1).
- Steinþór Steingrímsson and Bjarki Ármannsson. 2025. In Pursuit of the Trivial. Proceedings of the 9th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries
conference. [paper]
- Bjarki Ármannsson, Finnur Ágúst Ingimundarson and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson. 2025. An Icelandic Linguistic Benchmark for Large
Language Models. Proceedings of the 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa). [paper]
- Bjarki Ármannsson, Hinrik Hafsteinsson, Jóhannes B. Sigtryggsson, Atli Jasonarson, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson and
Steinþór Steingrímsson. 2025. Playing by the Rules: A Benchmark Set for Standardized Icelandic Orthography. Proceedings of the 25th Nordic Conference
on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa). [paper]
-
Bjarki Ármannsson, Hinrik Hafsteinsson, Atli Jasonarson and Steinþór Steingrímsson. 2024. Killing Two Flies with One Stone:
An Attempt to Break LLMs Using English→Icelandic Idioms and Proper Names. Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT).
[paper]
- Atli Jasonarson, Hinrik Hafsteinsson, Bjarki Ármannsson and Steinþór Steingrímsson. 2024. Cogs in a Machine,
Doing What They're Meant to Do: The AMI Submission to the WMT24 General Translation Task. Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT).
[paper]
Talks and Presentations
- Bjarki Ármannsson. Mállíkön og myndun orða. [Language Models and Compounding in Icelandic.] Lunchtime talk for the Linguistic Society of Iceland, April 2025.
- Bjarki Ármannsson, Finnur Ágúst Ingimundarson, Iris Edda Nowenstein and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson. For LLMs, Even an Abundance of
the Stimulus is Not Enough: A View from Icelandic. Presentation at the 49th annual Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC), April 2025. [abstract]
Other Publications
- Bjarki Ármannsson. 2025. „Góð bílstjóri“ og „bestunárangur“: Það sem gervigreindin lærir og lærir ekki í íslensku. [What AI does and does not learn in Icelandic.]
Article for the webzine Mannamál. [link]
Language Resources
- Bjarki Ármannsson, Finnur Ágúst Ingimundarson and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson. 2024.
Icelandic Linguistic Benchmark for LLMs 24.10, CLARIN-IS. [repo]
- Bjarki Ármannsson, et al. 2024.
Icelandic Standardization Benchmark Set: Spelling and Punctuation 24.10, CLARIN-IS. [repo]
- Anna Björk Nikulásdóttir, Bjarki Ármannsson and Bryndís Bergþórsdóttir. 2022.
Icelandic Pronunciation Dictionary for Language Technology 22.01, CLARIN-IS. [repo]
Theses
- Bjarki Ármannsson. 2021. Grapheme-to-phoneme transcription of English words in Icelandic text. MA thesis, Uppsala University.
[thesis]
Media and Panels
- Challenges and opportunities in underrepresented language AI. Panel discussion at TrustLLM's second annual consortium, June 2025.
- Íslenska og gervigreind. [AI and the Icelandic language.] Youtube interview with Icelandic media outlet Samstöðin about LLMs and Icelandic in the digital age, May 2025. [link]
- Íslenskar „maðkabækur“ til sölu á Amazon. ["Maggot books" in Icelandic for sale on Amazon.] Interviewed by Icelandic National Broadcaster RÚV about AI-generated books in Icelandic online, May 2025.
[link]