LANGUAGE IN INDIA

A SURVEY OF THE STATE OF THE ART IN
TAMIL LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY
S. Rajendran, Ph.D.

A PRELUDE

The use of computer for language analysis leads to the technological development of languages in general, and Tamil, in particular. The world scenario has its impact on Tamil language too. Both the government and private organizations have initiated programs for the technological development of Tamil language.

The Department of Electronics had conducted training Courses on Natural Language Processing through selected institutions throughout India and paved way to technological development of Tamil. It funded Machine Translation programs among Indian languages and between English and Indian languages. It also funded for the development of corpus for Indian languages. It had identified certain centres for the Technological Development of Indian languages and funded them to initiate projects, which aims to achieve their goal.

Anna University at Chennai had been identified for the technological development of Tamil language and provided with a fund of a few crores of rupees to fulfill this mission. Under this scheme a Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions-Tamil has been established at Anna University. A team of researchers employed under the scheme has prepared a number of Language Technology Products. This has lead to the technological development of Tamil in many areas. Many other organizations, both government and private, followed this.

Tamil University at Thanjavur, Tamil Virtual University, AUKBC Research Centre at Chennai, Central Institute of Indian Languages at Mysore and International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT), which conducts international conference of Tamil internet every year, put their efforts for the technological development of Tamil. Apart from the above institutions IIT, Chennai, IISC, Bangalore, and Micro Software, Bangalore also have contributed for the technological development of Tamil.

In this paper the technological development of Tamil has been classified under certain heads and the research works under taken and successfully completed as well as the products made are discussed in details.

CORPUS AND CORPUS MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Corpus linguistics seeks to further our understanding of language through the analysis of large quantities of naturally occurring data. There is a long tradition of corpus linguistic studies in Europe. The need for corpus for a language is multifarious. Starting from the preparation of a dictionary or lexicon to machine translation, corpus has become an inevitable resource for technological development of languages. Corpus means a body of huge text incorporating various types of textual materials, including newspaper, weeklies, fictions, scientific writings, literary writings, and so on. Corpus represents all the styles of a language. Corpus must be very huge in size as it is going to be used for many language applications such as preparation of lexicons of different sizes, purposes and types, machine translation programs and so on.

Tagged corpus, Parallel Corpus, and Aligned Corpus

CIIL Corpus for Tamil

As for as building corpus for the Indian languages is concerned it was Central Institute of Indian languages (CIIL) which took initiative and started preparing corpus for some of the Indian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam). Department of electronics (DOE) financed the corpus-building project. The target was to prepare corpus with ten million words for each language. But due to financial crunch and time restriction it ends up with three million words for each language. Tamil corpus with three million words is built by CIIL in this way. It is a partially tagged corpus. This corpus is available in CD and one can get a free copy from CIIL for research purpose. At present CIIL is planning to build corpus with 10 million words for Indian languages.

AUKBCRC’s Improved Tagged Corpus for Tamil

AUKBC Research Centre which has taken up NLP oriented works for Tamil, has improved upon the CIIL Tamil Corpus and tagged it for their MT programs. It also developed parallel corpora for English-Tamil to promote its goal of preparingan MT tool for English-Tamil translation. Parallel corpus is very useful for training the corpus and for building example based machine translation. Parallel corpus is a useful tool for MT programs.

Corpus Indexing Tools (Concordance, KWIC index, etc.)

Many such tools have been made for Tamil. A few important ones are listed below in the article.

This Article

In addition, this long and detailed research article makes a detailed presentation on the state of the art in the field of Tamil language technology and reviews the strengths and weaknesses of current research and suggests directions for future work.

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