The Center for Tamil natural language processing research aims to research and develop natural language processing tools required for Tamil and to build a active scholarly network of people contributing to the advancement of the language.
Vision
Lay the groundwork in the field of natural language processing to adopt technological advancements for the longevity and completeness of Tamil language and to prepare it for the next generation.
Objectives
- Perform fundamental research in the language and technology that is needed to develop natural language processing tools for Tamil.
- Gather information from present and previous work, analyse and review them. Organise these work into the themes of the center to support the current research, and launch future projects.
- Establish scientifically validated methodologies and frameworks that help standardising technology related to the Tamil language. These standards will be used as ground rules and serve as the basis for future research and application development.
- Delivering language essentials to researchers and communities, e.g. dictionary databases, data corpus, language packs for multi-language applications, etc.
- To build a global opensource platform containing language and processing resources, products/applications which would ultimately serve for text/speech processing, analytics and knowledge engineering in Tamil.
- Promote synergy with independent research groups, institutions and universities that engage in Tamil natural language processing research. Offer a common platform for collaboration and information exchange while providing required resources, help and consultancy for emerging research scholars.
Research Themes
The center will be focusing on the following set of research themes under which projects would be undertaken.
- Language Parsing, Resolution & Modelling
- Machine Translation & Transliteration
- Human-Machine Interface
- Evolutionary Study of Language
- Knowledge Engineering
View our Project Road Map that lists projects under the center’s research themes.
Open Source Policy
We are committed to developing open source tools and the furtherance of the open source personal research community. Tamil language is open to everyone in the world and therefore our strong belief is that the knowledge related to the language should not be restricted within a closed community. Our research and developed tools will be published on publicly available media, making it free for anyone to use, change, and improve. We see this open source approach as enabling the innovation and also helping to ensure that the adoption of technology into the language is a transparent process with positive societal impact.
Nevertheless, we have various contributors donating their intellectual properties and proprietary contributions from third parties. These contributions are made by broad minded individuals and institutions with the devotion on the language of Tamil. We respect the agreements with these contributors and endeavor to protect and use their properties as stated in the conditions.