IMPHAL, November 4: Taking up the initiative to provide the much needed boost for Manipuri language and for ‘building of co-opera’ in the Linguistic Data Consortium of Indian Languages (LDCIL), the Department of Language Planning and Implementation (DLPI) is organising a five-day training programme on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in relation to Manipuri Language.
The programme organized in collaboration with the Central Institute of Indian languages (CIIL), MHRD, Government of India, Mysore was inaugurated today at the Conference Hall of School Education Directorate, Lamphel.
Addressing the inaugural function, director of DLPI Kh Raghumani said that Manipuri language enjoys a high status after its inclusion in the 8th Schedule of India; nevertheless, the language continues to be still backward when it comes to its technical aspect.
The language presently has not been included in the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages, he elaborated while citing that the Manipuri speaking population is not even three millions in our country.
Owing to the population factor, the Manipuri language is not included in the advance technical stages like Google, IBM or in Microsoft, he observed.
Elaborating further, he said that there are altogether 22 languages included in the 8th Schedule out which only nine have NLP facilities.
The private firms that undertake Natural Language Processing for languages consider the Manipuri Language not a profitable enough language to be processed, he said.
Raghumani also said that the major tasks to be discussed and highlighted during the training programes are “machine translation” which will result in internet texts in Manipuri, important documents/information issued by the government of India/ other agencies in Manipuri; “Optical Character Recognition” OCR for Manipuri spell-checker, transcription of Bengali script into Meitei Mayek and vice versa.
He continued, during the training programme the participants will also discuss morphological segmentation parsing; part of speech tagging, sentence boundary disambiguation; word sense disambiguation for Manipuri grammar checker.
Meanwhile, on the sideline of the function, joint director of the department, Dr L Mahabir said that the NLP is actively growing technique included in the Applied Linguistic group which is established in the 1980’s and is a computation aspect of language development through which a human brain function can be performed by the computer.
He said the NLP will translate the Manipuri words in English through the process termed Artificial Intelligences.
The main objective of the five days of training is to set up “building of co-opera” which will contain millions of Manipuri words, phrases, word meaning for Manipur words checker in a computer, he said before adding that while the Manipuri language has no co-opera, the much developed English language has 70 million co-opera and is targeting for more.
He continued that the experts are consulting Manipuri books covering different fields including literature, history, etc and even groups working on Manipuri literature like Manipur Sahitya Parishad, Culture Forum Manipur, KALAM, MEELAN etc are invited for the same reason.
The training programme is the first step in forwarding the development of Manipuri languages by the Directorate of Language Planning and Implementation.
The DLPI appealed for co-operation from all sections of the society for the successful initiation of language setup ‘building of Co-Opera’.
The training will be participated by four faculties both from and outside the state.
The department will give some pressure to the state government for issuing proper equipment and infrastructure so that the Manipuri language may advance scientifically and technically, he said.