A language technology project for Turkish from TDK and HAVELSAN: DİLBİS
A project announced by the Turkish Language Association (TDK) caught my attention: the Turkish Language Information System, or DİLBİS. The protocol signed between TDK and HAVELSAN was announced at a ceremony hosted by HAVELSAN on August 6, 2026, and the news came out the following day.
The ceremony was attended by Council of Higher Education (YÖK) President Prof. Dr. Derya Örs, TDK President Prof. Dr. Osman Mert, HAVELSAN General Manager Dr. Mehmet Akif Nacar, and administrators from both institutions. The goal of the project is to bring the deep heritage of the Turkish language together with modern information technology and to lay the foundation for domestic language technologies.
The article lists these points: a data management infrastructure will be built for TDK; the target is a Turkish language database containing written texts, spoken sources and visual materials, centered on Turkish as used in Türkiye, which Örs described as billions of labeled data points and words; AI technologies will be made available to TDK; and HAVELSAN's national AI platform MAIN will be integrated into this infrastructure.
According to Nacar, the project will strengthen the use of Turkish in the digital world and increase Türkiye's competitiveness in language technologies. The article gives no information on budget, duration or timeline, so I should say that we do not know those details yet.
What interests me most: large language models are mostly trained on English data, so a language institution that labels its own corpus and builds a database could also be valuable to people learning and researching Turkish. Is there a similar effort in your language?
Source: Türk Dil Kurumu
The ceremony was attended by Council of Higher Education (YÖK) President Prof. Dr. Derya Örs, TDK President Prof. Dr. Osman Mert, HAVELSAN General Manager Dr. Mehmet Akif Nacar, and administrators from both institutions. The goal of the project is to bring the deep heritage of the Turkish language together with modern information technology and to lay the foundation for domestic language technologies.
The article lists these points: a data management infrastructure will be built for TDK; the target is a Turkish language database containing written texts, spoken sources and visual materials, centered on Turkish as used in Türkiye, which Örs described as billions of labeled data points and words; AI technologies will be made available to TDK; and HAVELSAN's national AI platform MAIN will be integrated into this infrastructure.
According to Nacar, the project will strengthen the use of Turkish in the digital world and increase Türkiye's competitiveness in language technologies. The article gives no information on budget, duration or timeline, so I should say that we do not know those details yet.
What interests me most: large language models are mostly trained on English data, so a language institution that labels its own corpus and builds a database could also be valuable to people learning and researching Turkish. Is there a similar effort in your language?
Source: Türk Dil Kurumu
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