Linguistic Society of India (LSI) president Prof. G. Umamaheshwara Rao on Monday, June 19, said that language barriers are getting erased and there should not be a classification of languages as ancient or recent, classical or standard, and simple or complex. “The notion of some languages being standard and a few others being substandard is unscientific,” he explained.
In his inaugural address at the Summer School in Computational Linguistics organised by the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL), Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysuru, Prof. Rao traced the emergence of language and explained that the first phase of language technology started with writing on different surfaces; book forms and publication are the second phase, and transferring ideas and thoughts across the globe through internet is the third phase of technology. Real-time automatic systems can eradicate language barriers. It is with this objective, such summer schools are being organised, he explained.
Prof. Shailendra Mohan, Director, CIIL, in his presidential address, said it is a good opportunity to learn language technology. All languages are equal, and all Indian languages are equally important to the institute. All Indian languages follow a similar kind of pattern — the morphological and script-wise differences are minimal.
“Languages share so many similar words. The technology that is developed for one language can be extended to other languages too. The technology can eliminate the language barriers in a few years. The Institute has been organising such numerous programmes in collaboration with various universities and institutions for the promotion of Indian languages,” he observed.
Dr. Narayan Kumar Choudhary, office in-charge, LDC-IL spoke about the objectives of the programme. He mentioned that linguists can develop language technology with the help of language algorithms and computational technologies.
While speaking of the objectives of the SSCL-2023, Dr. Choudhary said the programme gives exposure to the field of language technology, trains linguists with the recent advancements in the field, creates resources (corpus) for future work within the project, and also to prepare resource persons in Indian languages for the future.
There will be 25 lectures in different areas of language technology, including different sub-domains like corpus, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and hands-on sessions facilitated by industry and academic experts for each relevant language technology tasks, at the programme.
Around 70 participants from various universities, IITs and research institutes of the country are participating.
