Anna University: Tamil Computing Lab
Tamil Computing Lab (TaCoLa) has been functioning in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna University, Chennai, TamilNadu, India for over a decade. Its focus is on producing top quality research and products in the field of Natural Language Processing with special emphasis on Tamil. TaCoLa's areas of research include Language Technology, Text Mining, Information Retrieval and Extraction, Speech, Music Processing, Text to Animation and more. The lab has produced over 35 high quality journal articles and has developed various products under these trending research areas.
The Language technology tools and products developed at TaCola are Atcharam(Morphological Analyzer), Atchayam (Morphological Generator), Kadhambam (Part of speech Tagger), Vaanavil (Sentence Parser), Annam (Spell checker), Yaazhini (UNL Enconverter), Poonguzhali (A chatter bot), Gurukulam (Flash based tutorials), Sol Alaigal (World`s First Social Networking Analysis tool for Tamil), Edhiroli (A Tamil Text to Speech Engine), Bommalaattam (A Text to video system), Arangam (Tamil Presentation Tool), Palagai (Tamil Word Processor), Sadhurangam (Tamil Spreadsheet), Thookku Thookki (Popular Hangman game in Tamil), Miruginajambo (Unscramble Game in Tamil), CoRee( concept based search engine) and Agaraadhi (Online Tamil dictionary).
Among the above given projects, CoRee and Agaraadhi are on the anvil. CoRee is the first fully functional concept based search engine developed for an Indian Language. The search engine tries to understand Tamil web documents rather than just remembering the keywords like the traditional search engines do. CoRee aims at indexing the web dcouments as a set of concepts and their relations. CoRee presents the results in a special Matrix Layout to demostrate its power compared to the traditional search engines. CoRee is world's first search engine to present results in a Matrix layout. The engine is based on CoRee search framework and CoRex indexer designed and developed in TaCoLa. The current version of CoRee is part of the Cross Lingual Information Access consotium project funded by Ministry of Information and Communication Technology India.
Agaraadhi is a flagship product that integrates many language technology tools developed in the lab. Agaraadhi.com is an online dictionary for Tamil and English. The website not just gives the meaning of the query word given, but also gives 20 features of the word. Some of the features are word sweetness score, word popularity score, morphological analyser, morphological generator, spell checker, word suggestions,Number to Text, phonetic Translitration, picture dictionary,location map, socialnet sharing, twitter updates, word of the day, thirukkurals, bharathiyaar songs, avvayaar songs and lyrics pertaining to the query word.