Indian Government initiatives in language computing
India is famous for its diversity in terms of languages and cultures. Every state under India is unique. Even though Hindi is official language of India and English is used as a common medium of communication, Indian Government feels that it should strengthen regional languages for a better national bonding. Government has taken many initiations to strengthen the presence of regional languages in computers. Technology Development Indian Languages (TDIL) Program is such a great language computing effort from Indian Government. TDIL Program Director Swaran Lata talks about TDIL and its efforts in language computing domain. The following are the excerpts taken when Swaran Lata gave a presentation at the Internet Tamil Conference (Tamilnadu, India) held at Coimbatore recently.
"It is not an overstatement when we say that India is the most unique among the world countries. There are 22 officially recognized languages and 11 scripts in vogue in India. One script may be used for more than one language. Now, it is the era of Information Technology. It is good to see that Computer technology breaks the language barrier and bridges the gap between the various sections of the society through easier access to information using their respective languages. So it is so obvious that the language computing becomes central to the exchange of information across speakers of various languages inside the country."
"Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) Program is an initiative from Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India develop information processing tools to facilitate human machine interaction in Indian languages and to develop technologies to access multilingual knowledge resources. TDIL aims at developing basic information processing technologies and consolidating and packaging them in user friendly form and releasing them to the masses for free-use."
"The major hurdle in the development of software for the Indian languages is in bringing together language scholars and software engineers. TDIL has been allocated sufficient funds for the development of technology for 22 Indian official languages. TDIL will act as a bridge between language scholars and software engineers. Languages Hindi and Tamil have been given more priority as the Hindi is used in maximum parts of the country and the Tamil language has demand from the NRI community besides the State Government."
"It was in 1990-91, TDIL program was born. The projects supported by TDIL were development of corpora, OCR, Text-to-Speech, machine translation and generic software for Information processing. Standards for keyboard layout and internal Code for Information Interchange were also evolved. This resulted into confidence in having solutions for Information processing in Indian languages."
"But demand by Government and people continued as thrust for developing Indian language technology solutions. So, in the period of 2000-2001, Government launched mission-oriented program for TDIL. Its focus was on seven major initiatives by then: Knowledge Resources, Knowledge Tools, Translation Support Systems, Human Machine Interface Systems, Localization, Standardization and Language Technology Human Resource Development. Thirteen Resource centres for Indian Language Technology Solutions (RC-ILTS) were supported covering all 18 Indian languages."
“TDIL Data Centre have got Free Fonts & Software Tools for languages Assamese, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu,Gujarati, Sanskrit, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, Nepali, Bangla, Kashmiri, Konkani, Manipuri, Santali and Sindhi.”
"TDIL, now, has got thirteen resource centres across the country. Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (Hindi, Nepali), Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai (Marathi, Konkani), Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (Assamese, Manipuri), Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (Kannada, Sanskrit), Indian Statistical Institute, kolkata (Bengali), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Foreign Languages (Japanese, Chinese) & Sanskrit (Language Learning Systems), University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad (Telugu), Anna University, Chennai (Tamil), MS University, Baroda (Gujarati), Utkal University, Department of Computer Science and Application (Oriya), Thapar Institute of Engineering & Tech., Patiala (Punjabi), ERDCI, Thiruvananthapuram (Malayalam), and CDAC, Pune (Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri ) are the resource centres."
At TDIL, we are working towards a wired world which overcomes the English barrier and the National Roll Out initiative was a first step in this direction. National Rollout Plan. Through this plan, Software tools and fonts for all 22 Indian languages have been released in the public domain. The National Rollout Plan CD-ROM typically contained the following software tools: Fonts, Keyboard Drivers, converters, editors, typing tutors, Integrated Word Processor, Bharateeya Open Office, Bilingual Dictionaries, Spell checker, Transliteration tool, Browser, Email Client, Messenger, Text to Speech system and OCR. People can download these CD-ROMs from www.ildc.gov.in and www.ildc.in or people can register their names so that ILDC will send CD-ROMs to their address. It is totally free."
“Major ongoing TDIL projects are the following - English to Indian Languages Machine Translation System (CDAC, Pune), English to Indian Languages Machine Translation (MT) System with Angla-Bharti Technology (IIT Kanpur), Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation System (IIIT Hyderabad), Sanskrit-Hindi Machine Translation (University of Hyderabad, JNU), Document Analysis & Recognition System for Indian Languages (IIT Delhi), On-Line Handwriting Recognition (I.I.Sc, Bangalore), Cross Lingual Information Access (IIT, Bombay), Speech Corpora & Technologies (IIIT Chennai) and Indian Language Corpora Initiative (JNU, New Delhi).”
"Language technology is the backbone of Indian economy and promises a great hope for the export looking software industry to start looking at local markets leading to a domestic IT boom by building customized and localized IT solutions. Now this project has to go beyond the technology development goal and couple it with initiatives of other Ministries and State Governments in percolating the use of these tools to reach the wider segment of the society."