Brainstorming ideas on more Tamil avenues ahead in Internet

Experts, academics and students are tackling challenge to make ‘intelligent’ use of available data

September 20, 2014 11:51 am | Updated April 20, 2016 05:30 am IST - PUDUCHERRY:

Delegates at the 13th International Tamil Internet conference in Puducherry on Friday Photo: T.Singaravelou

Delegates at the 13th International Tamil Internet conference in Puducherry on Friday Photo: T.Singaravelou

What would be the next step forward for Tamil Internet, and possibly with it the future of all Indic languages on the Internet, experts, academics and students are brainstorming at a three-day Tamil Internet 2014 conference here.

Organised by the International Forum of Information Technology in Tamil (INFIIT), a non-profit organisation registered in the United States, the conference currently under way at the Pondicherry University is the 13th annual event organised with an intention of creating a multilingual Internet that is not just dominated by English.

Though INFIIT’s conference focuses on Tamil Internet, some of the lessons can be applied to all Indic languages.

Academic M. Anandhakrishnan, who is currently the chairman of IIT-Kanpur and has been associated with INFIIT since its inception, said the quality of the papers and the topics being presented at the conference had shown dramatic improvement in recent years. Many research students and professors were presenting detailed papers on complex topics.

The next big thing

If the first few years of the Tamil Internet conferences were largely about setting the standards for encoding Tamil language so that it could be seen literally on every computer in the world in uniform manner, the challenge now is to make ‘intelligent’ use of the data that is available.

With the inclusion of Tamil in the Unicode consortium a few years ago, and almost every device manufacturer offering Tamil language support out of the box, the researchers are now training their efforts into more complex challenges like natural language processing.

The conference focuses on four broad areas that are seen as growth potential with regard to Tamil Internet: Optical Character Recognition, Tamil in mobile platforms, Natural Language Processing technologies and Text-to-speech conversion.

During the course of an informal chat with this correspondent, Vasu Renganathan from the University of Pennsylvania, whose paper ‘Computational Phonology and the development of text-to-speech application for Tamil,’ said one of the earliest programmes for Tamil Language learning was funded by the CIA.

Mr. Anandhakrishnan lamented the fact that despite awareness of cutting-edge research in the field of Tamil Internet and generally the prowess in all local languages, none of the big technology companies had volunteered to back any of the projects that could potentially change the scenario by making the Internet accessible to the masses.

“The mindset has to change. A lot of the wealthy technology companies in India are just software service providers. They should see themselves as product companies and look at the enormous potential. Some of the ideas being presented here need to be translated to products that can reach out to millions of people,” he said.

The Tamil Internet Conference 2014 is being hosted by the Pondicherry University and is being supported by the Pondicherry Government. Chief Minister N. Rangasamy and Pondicherry University Vice-Chancellor Prof. Chandra Krishnamurthy, have extended their support for the event. To learn more about the conference and the agenda for the next two days, log into http://www.infitt.org/ti2014/.

An exhibition of Tamil software products has been organised at the emporium near Gandhi Thidal on Beach Road till Sunday to coincide with the conference.

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