Research on for machine translation of Indian languages

Hyderabad, Jan 7 (UNI) International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Director Rajeev Sangal today said research to realise machine translation of six Indian languages was on to benefit the rural population in the country, as part of the Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Addressing a press conference in connection with the third International joint Conference on NLP to be held in the city from January eight to 12, he said the research for machine translation of the languages --Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Malayalam-- would take two more years to complete.

Nine institutions in the country were involved in the project.

He said India with 21 recognised languages and thousands of dialects, needed the latest technology, including speech recognition and machine translation, for NLP.

Mr Sangal said the Centre had earmarked Rs 13,000 crore for e-Governance during the next five-year plan period under National e-Governance Application plan.

He said that without natural language interface, it would be impossible for illiterate rural masses to utilise government services in an efficient manner.

He said the conference would be attended by nearly 350 researchers, including 185 from 27 countries like the US, Europe, China, Korea, Japan and Singapore.

Word segmentation, tagging, chuking, shallow parsing, parsing, semantic processing and lexical semantics, ontologies and linguistic resoruces and machine learning for NLP were among the subjects, which would be taken up for discussion in the conference.

Mr Sangal said this was the third biennial conference organised by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), founded in 2004 to promote research and development efforts in the field of computational processing of natural languages of importance to the Asian region.

During the conference, special two-day sessions were planned on NLP in India' to take stock of various research initiatives being taken up under the consortium, supported by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to give necessary directions to the research work, he added.

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