Workshop on analysers begins at CIIL

Language data is the key ingredient in terms of research and development in the area of language technology. Compared to European languages, Indian languages lag far behind in this area as the resources are limited and scarce.

To understand this concept, the Linguistics Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL) of Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) is conducting a three-day national-level workshop on Building Morphological Analyzers for Indian Languages under the Shallow Parser Tools for Indian Languages in collaboration with the Centre for Applied Linguists and Translation Studies, School of Humanities University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. The workshop began on Tuesday at the CIIL premises.

University of Hyderabad professor of linguistics Prof Umamaheshwar Rao briefed the scholars and delegates on the objective workshop and its significance for Indian languages development.

Earlier Head,  LDC-IL L Ramamoorthy spoke activities of CIIL and LDC-IL and its tremendous work on morph analyzers.

Around 38 scholars from various universities of the country are participating as resource persons and they are representing 12 languages viz., Hindi, Assamese, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarathi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Manipuri, Maithili, Nepali, Oriya and Santhali.
Besides this the academic and technical resource persons of LDC-IL and academic consultants from NTM of CIIL are also participating, said a release from CIIL.

According to the release, the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL) has been set up as an Eleventh Plan Project of the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development. This Project came into existence on April 1, 2007. However, real implementation with proper human resources commenced only from June, 2008.

This consortium, being set up on the lines of the LDC at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), will not only create and manage large Indian languages databases (in the form of text as well as speech), it will also provide a forum for researchers in India and other countries working on Indian languages to publish and build products for use based on such databases, added the release.