WILDRE
2nd Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation
27 May 2014, Harpa Conference Centre, Reykjavik, Iceland
(Organized under LREC2014, May26-31, 2014)
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- Organizers
- Committee
- Invited Speakers
- Schedule
Motivation and Aim
In the past couple of decades, the Indian NLP and Speech Technology community has shown an ever increasing interest in the development of Language Resources for Indian Languages. This has primarily been due to the fact that as the community grew, increasing research in and development of Language Technology brought out the acute awareness of a serious lack of appropriate resources across the languages of India. A number of initiatives have been taken to address this issue, by the Government of India as well as academia and the industry. Many of these initiatives have targeted specific NLP and Speech technologies, inculcating collaborations between several academic institutions across the country, and active involvement of industry partners. As expected, when a number of resources are simultaneously being developed by several research groups across many languages, the need for standards also takes on some urgency. In the past 5 years, the Govt. of India, in consultation with the experts from academia and industry have taken lead in developing appropriate standards for NLP resources. This concentrated effort has resulted in a number resources, standards, tools and technologies becoming available for many Indian languages in the past few years. While the activity in the Indian Language community may still not be comparable to for example, the work done on European languages, we firmly believe that the community has come of age and is at a point where sharing of ideas and experience is necessary, not only within the community but with other communities working in similar situations, so that India can move forward in planning for the future language technology resources and requirement while maintaining its linguistic diversity.
India has 4 language families – Indo Aryan (76.87 % speakers), Dravidian (20.82 % speakers) being the major ones. These families have contributed 22 constitutionally recognized (‘scheduled’ or ‘national’) languages out of which Hindi has the ‘official’ status in addition to having the ‘national’ status. Besides these, India has 234 mother tongues reported by the recent census (2001), and many more (more than 1600) languages and dialects. Of the major Indian languages, Hindi is spoken in 10 (out of a total of 25) states of India with a total population of over 60 % followed by Telugu and Bangla. There are more than 18 scripts in India which need to be standardized and supported by technology. Devanagari is the largest script being used by more than 6 languages.
Indian languages are under the exclusive control of respective states they are spoken in. Therefore every state may decide on measures to promote its language. However, since these 22 languages are national (constituent) languages, the center (union of India) also has responsibility towards each of them, though it has certain additional responsibility towards Hindi which is national as well official language of the Indian union. From time to time, minor/neglected languages claim constituent status. The situation becomes more complex when such a language becomes the rallying point for the demand for a new state or autonomous region.
This complex linguistic scene in India is a source of tremendous pressure on the Indian government to not only have comprehensive language policies, but also to create resources for their maintenance and development. In the age of information technology, there is a greater need to have a fine balance between allocation of resources to each language keeping in view the political compulsions, electoral potential of a linguistic community and other issues.
Language promotion and maintenance by the Ministry of Human Resource Development
The MHRD through its language agency called CIIL and many academic institutions across the country has set up a Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDCIL). This consortium, being set up in the lines of the LDC at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), will not only create and manage large Indian languages databases, it will also provide a forum for researchers in India and other countries working on Indian languages to publish and build products for use based on such databases that would not otherwise be possible.
LDC-IL is expected to:
The Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) program of the Ministry of Communications and IT (MCIT)
The MCIT started a program called TDIL in 1991 for building technology solutions for Indian languages. The stated objective of the TDIL is
(i) to develop information processing tools and techniques,
(ii) to facilitate human-machine interaction without language barrier,
(iii) to create and access multilingual knowledge resources and integrate them to develop innovative user products and services.The TDIL has made available in the public domain many basic software tools and fonts for 22 Indian languages. On the language resources funds, TDIL is running several language corpora projects in consortium mode. Some of the significant projects are:
• Development of LRs for English to Indian Languages Machine Translation (MT) System,
• Development of LRs Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation System
• Development of LRS Sanskrit-Hindi Machine Translation
• Development of LRs for Robust Document Analysis & Recognition System for Indian Languages
• Development of LRs for On-line handwriting recognition system
• Development of LRs Cross-lingual Information Access
• Development of Speech Corpora/Technologies
• Parallel Language Corpora development in all 22 national languages (ILCI)Apart from the consortium-based efforts, there have been several specific institution/organization based efforts in developing standard resources for Indian Languages. Some prominent efforts include The Hindi Wordnet developed at IIT-Bombay, POS-Tagged Corpora developed in Bangla, Hindi and Sanskrit by Microsoft Research India in collaboration with Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Given the amount of activity in the area of Language Technology Resources at the government, Institution, as well as individual researcher level, we think a Workshop for Indian Language Resources and Evaluation is not only timely but absolutely imperative. We also feel that LREC is the best possible venue for such a workshop as the situation in Europe is comparable to India in terms of linguistic diversity and identity. ELRA and its associate organizations have been extremely active and successful in addressing the challenges and opportunities such a situation can often bring with it. Collocating WILRE with LREC will give our research community to interact with and learn from those involved in similar initiatives. LREC itself will also provide an exposure to challenges, and possible solutions globally, resulting in, we hope, enriching exchange of ideas.
Thus, the main aim of WILRE will be
- To map the status of Indian Language Resources
- To investigate challenges related to creating and sharing various levels of language resources
- To promote a dialogue between language resource developers and users
- To provide opportunity for researchers from India to collaborate with researchers from other parts of the world
Description of Topic
WILRE will invite technical, policy and position paper submissions on the following topics related to Indian Language Resources:
- Text corpora
- Speech corpora
- Lexicons and Machine-readable dictionaries
- Ontologies
- Grammars
- Annotation of corpora
- Language resources for basic NLP, IR and Speech Technology tasks, tools and
- Infrastructure for constructing and sharing language resources
- Standards or specifications for language resources applications
- Licensing and copyright issues
Both submission and review processes handled electronically. The review process will be blind. The workshop website will provide the submission guidelines and the link for the electronic submission.
WILDRE2- 2nd Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation
2nd WORKSHOP ON INDIAN LANGUAGE DATA: RESOURCES AND EVALUATION (WILDRE)
Date: Tuesday, 27th May 2014
Venue: Harpa Conference Centre, Reykjavik, Iceland (Organized in under the platform of LREC2014 (26-31 May 2014))
Website:
main website - http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in/conf/wildre2 submit papers on - http://www.softconf.com/lrec2014/WILDRE/ WILDRE – the 2nd workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation is being organized in Reykjavik, Iceland on 27th May, 2014 under the LREC platform. India has a huge linguistic diversity and has seen concerted efforts from the Indian government and industry towards developing language resources. European Language Resource Association (ELRA) and its associate organizations have been very active and successful in addressing the challenges and opportunities related to language resource creation and evaluation. It is therefore a great opportunity for resource creators of Indian languages to showcase their work on this platform and also to interact and learn from those involved in similar initiatives all over the world.
The broader objectives of the WILDRE will be
- To map the status of Indian Language Resources
- To investigate challenges related to creating and sharing various levels of language resources
- To promote a dialogue between language resource developers and users
- To provide opportunity for researchers from India to collaborate with researchers from other parts of the world
DATES
February 28, 2014 Paper submissions due
March 30, 2014 Paper notification of acceptance
April 10, 2014 Camera-ready papers due
May 27, 2014 Workshop
SUBMISSIONS
Papers must describe original, completed or in progress, and unpublished work. Each submission will be reviewed by two program committee members.
Accepted papers will be given up to 10 pages (for full papers) 5 pages (for short papers and posters) in the workshop proceedings, and will be presented oral presentation or poster.
Papers should be formatted according to the style-sheet, which will be provided on the LREC 2014 website (lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/).
Please submit papers in PDF/doc format to the LREC website
We are seeking submissions under the following category
- Full papers (10 pages)
- Short papers (work in progress – 5 pages)
- Posters (innovative ideas/proposals, research proposal of students)
- Demo (of working online/standalone systems)
Though our area of interest covers all NLP/language technology related activity for Indian languages, we would like to focus on the resource creation in the following areas-
- Text corpora
- Speech corpora
- Lexicons and Machine-readable dictionaries
- Ontologies
- Grammars
- Annotation of corpora
- Language resources for basic NLP, IR and Speech Technology tasks, tools and
- Infrastructure for constructing and sharing language resources
- Standards or specifications for language resources applications
- Licensing and copyright issues
Both submission and review processes will handled electronically using the Start interface of the LREC website. The workshop website will provide the submission guidelines and the link for the electronic submission.
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.), to enable their reuse, replicability of experiments, including evaluation ones, etc...
For further information on this initiative, please refer to http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/ .Conference Chairs
- Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
- Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India Lab, Bangalore
- Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai
Program Committee (to be updated)
- A. Kumaran, Microsoft Research, India
- Amba Kulkarni, University of Hyderabad, India
- Chris Cieri, LDC, University of Pennsylvania
- Dafydd Gibbon, Universität Bielefeld, Germany
- Dipti Mishra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
- Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
- Hans Uszkoreit, Saarland University, Germany
- Indranil Datta, English & Foreign Language University, Hyderabad, India
- Jopseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
- Jyoti Pawar, Goa University, India
- Kalika Bali, MSRI, Bangalore, India
- Karunesh Arora, CDAC Noida, India
- Malhar Kulkarni, IIT Bombay, India
- Monojit Choudhary, Microsoft Research, India
- Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy
- Niladri Shekhar Dash, ISI Kolkata, India
- Panchanan Mohanty, University of Hyderabad, India
- Pushpak Bhattacharya, IIT Bombay, India
- S. S. Aggarwal, KIIT, Gurgaon
- Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai, India
- Umamaheshwar Rao, University of Hyderabad, India
- Zygmunt Vetulani, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Workshop contact:
Esha Banerjee, Sr Linguist, ILCI project @JNU esha.jnu@gmail.com
Conference Chairs
Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India Lab, Bangalore
Sobha L, AU-KBC, Anna UniversityDetails of the Organizers
Girish Nath Jha
Associate Professor in Computational Linguistics
Special Center for Sanskrit Studies,
J.N.U., New Delhi - 110067
ph.91-11-26741308 (o) Email: girishjha@gmail.comMukesh and Priti Chatter Distinguished Professor of History of Science,
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA
http://www.umassd.edu/indic/facultyandstaff/Girish Nath Jha is Associate Professor at the Special Center for Sanskrit Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) specializing in Computational Linguistics. He also has an honorary appointment at the Center for Indic Studies, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA, USA. Dr Jha’s research interests include Indian languages corpora and standards, Sanskrit and Hindi linguistics, Computational Lexicography, Machine Translation, Natural Language Interfaces, e-learning, web based technologies, RDBMS techniques, software design and localization. Dr Jha completed his doctoral degree in Linguistics (Computational Linguistics) from JNU and then did another masters degree in Linguistics (Natural Language Interface) from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA in 1999. Since then he worked as software engineer in USA before joining JNU in 2002. He has worked as consultant for LDC (University of Pennsylvania), Microsoft Corp and Microsoft Research India among others. Dr Jha is currently leading a consortium of Indian universities to develop parallel tagged corpora for major Indian languages.
Kalika Bali
Researcher (Multilingual Systems)
Microsoft Research Labs India
Address: “Vigyan” #9 Lavelle Road, Bangalore 560025 India
Phone: +91-80-66586218 Email: kalikab@microsoft.comKalika Bali is a researcher with the Multilingual Systems group at Microsoft Research Labs India (MSR-India) (Bangalore). Her primary research interests are in Speech Technology and Computational Linguistics, especially for Indian Languages. A linguist by training, she has taught at the University of the South Pacific as an Assoc. Prof. She has worked in the area of research and development of Language Technology at both start-ups and established companies like Nuance, Simputer, Hewlett-Packard Labs and Microsoft Research. She has been involved in development of standards related to language technologies, and is one of the authors of UPX- an XML based standard for online handwritten datasets. She represents Microsoft on Standards Committees related to Indian languages and has been an active participant in the formulation of LR standards for Indian languages. In her previous position at HP Labs India, she was one of a two-people team that drafted the proposal for LDCIL in India. At MSR-India, she has led projects related to resources creation and annotation.
Sobha L.
CLRG Group
AU-KBC Research Centre
MIT campus of Anna University
Chennai-600044
Phone: +91-44-22232711 Email:sobha@au-kbc.orgSobha Lalitha Devi is a scientist with the Information Sciences Division of AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai, India. Sobha’s research interest is in the field of Discourse analysis, Information Extraction and Retrieval. She specializes in the area of Anaphora Resolution. She is one of the key organizers of Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC). Other than the above areas she also works in the area of Automatic detection of Plagiarism and also organizes tracks in plagiarism detection. In the area of information retrieval she along with her students started the Tamil search engine www.searchko.in. She is involved in two major consortium projects funded by the Department of Information Technology, Government of India on Cross Lingual Information Access and Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation System (Tamil to Hindi bidirectional) and in an European Union(EU) funded project on WIQ-EI—Web Information Quality Evaluation Initiative. She was visiting faculty to universities in UK, Spain and Portugal. She is an Erasmus Mundus coordinator for 2010-2012 and is associated with University of Wolverhampton.
Program Committee (to be updated)
- A. Kumaran, Microsoft Research, India
- Amba Kulkarni, University of Hyderabad, India
- Chris Cieri, LDC, University of Pennsylvania
- Dafydd Gibbon, Universität Bielefeld, Germany
- Dipti Mishra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
- Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
- Hans Uszkoreit, Saarland University, Germany
- Indranil Datta, English & Foreign Language University, Hyderabad, India
- Jopseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
- Jyoti Pawar, Goa University, India
- Kalika Bali, MSRI, Bangalore, India
- Karunesh Arora, CDAC Noida, India
- Malhar Kulkarni, IIT Bombay, India
- Monojit Choudhary, Microsoft Research, India
- Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy
- Niladri Shekhar Dash, ISI Kolkata, India
- Panchanan Mohanty, University of Hyderabad, India
- Pushpak Bhattacharya, IIT Bombay, India
- S. S. Aggarwal, KIIT, Gurgaon
- Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai, India
- Umamaheshwar Rao, University of Hyderabad, India
- Zygmunt Vetulani, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Title and abstract of the keynote speech: Language description, documentation, deployment: challenges for the language technologies
The past half century has seen enormous progress, and also diversiication, in knowledge, experience and application in the language sciences and technologies. This progress spreads in parallel through classic linguistics and phonetics, through applied linguistics in teaching and speech therapy, further through documentary linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language processing and text technologies, and through the speech and multimodal technologies. Computational text analysis underlies internet search technologies, machine translation applications, basic speech recognition complements routing algorithms in satellite navigation systems, multimodal technologies enter into human-robot interaction. This list of fields and achievements sounds quite euphoric, but I would like to take a figurative deep breath and ask whether euphoria is justified, and in particular what are the problems which have arisen during this period, and which of these problems – if any - have been truly solved. I do not mean only technical and commercial problems. I mean not only the ‘digital divide’ on national and international levels, not only the differences between generously resourced and less-resourced languages and language communities, not only the problems with integrating speech and multimodal communication, and with extending the scope of machine translation, or with the sustainability of data and systems. There are two big questions which remain to be solved in creating resources for improving the empirical, theoretical and technological foundations of further work in these areas: the complexity and diversity of languages. There are many key issues in these areas which have not been fully explored, and yet which are familiar to linguistics as problems of language typology. To take the example of India: Indian languages fall, roughly, into four main historical and typological families, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Austro-Asiatic, based on the structure of the languages. Putting the issue simply: it is impossible to transfer results from the analysis of the so-called ‘commercially interesting’ languages like English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and, obviously, Hindi, to all of the languages of India in any simple way. One does not need to think only of the Tibeto-Burman tone languages of the North-East, and the Austro-Asiatic languages. Even among the Indo-Aryan languages there are languages with unique properties, such as Punjabi, which is commonly held to be the only true Indo-Aryan tone language, indeed the only true Indo-European tone language. Against this background of the complexity and diversity of language, this talk is designed to provide pointers to long-term research and development strategies, beyond the situation of being breathlessly driven by the needs of technological, pedagogical and therapeutic applications, for problem discovery and solutions in coming decades in the 21st century.
Panel Discussion
Topic: India and Europe - making a common cause in LTRs
Panelists
Workshop Programme
(27th May, 2014, 2.00 pm - 6.20 pm)
Please note that we have modified the schedule to allow some participants to leave early for the President's Reception and also the fact that some participants are not able to travel to Iceland for various reasons. The revised summary of the schedule is given below.Please download the detailed schedule