The mentorship programme involves a team of mentors who are scholars having knowledge and experience in natural language processing related research working either in academia or the industry. They would involve in mentoring and guiding the researchers towards the completion of research projects in their selected area of interest. Where needed mentors would be able to connect external linguistic scholars to the project in obtaining specialist advice in selected areas.
Apart from mentors there should be internal supervisors where the research students are based on. They would be responsible for managing the overall research projects, making sure deliverables and milestones are achieved on time and be responsible for allocating examiners for the research projects.
Benefits to Research Students
- Receive expert technical support, advice and exposure to diverse perspectives and experience from mentors and linguistic support from linguists when working on research projects.
- Access to valuable academic resources not accessible from Sri Lanka with the help of mentors
- Receive assistance and review comments from mentors in the process of writing quality papers and making sure the work gets published in a good venue.
- Receive grants with regard to travel costs, publication fee (if needed) and other expenses to attend conferences abroad or publish in journals. Grants would cover a percentage of the total cost or where applicable the full cost.
- Gain experience in industry engagement involving technical experts from the industry in developing and delivering research project prototypes into software products while also involving in marketing their products to the public in open source domain.
- Receive advice and guidelines on career development and pathway for students who want to pursue higher studies (MPhil, PHD).
- Receive support from the center’s online community through discussion forums involving open source contributors, scholars and other interested people in Tamil NLP.
Research Outputs
The final stage of research is disseminating the findings to an appropriate audience. We believe it’s is quite important to have research deliverables in every research project which includes a working prototype built according to high standards.
Research deliverables would be,
- A working prototype/demo of the system developed in Java
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publications in Conferences/Workshops or Journals
- Public/Private Talks
- Press Release, Articles & Interviews in Mainstream media