profile

Dr. Girish Nath Jha (PI)

Consortium Leader and PI for Hindi,English

Professor, Special Center for Sanskrit Studies, JNU, New Delhi-110067

girishjha@gmail.com

Website:
http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in

Brief Summary:

Dr Girish Nath Jha teaches Computational Linguistics at the Special Center for Sanskrit Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University since 2002. Prior to joining JNU, Dr Jha worked as a software development specialist and software engineer in USA from 1999-2002, as Teaching Assistant in the Linguistics Department of University of Illinois from 1996-1998 and as Research Assistant in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA (1998 - 1999). Dr Jha has also held Mukesh and Priti Chatter Distinguished Professor of History of Science professorship at the Center for Indic Studies, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA since 2009. Dr Jha has had several consultancies prominent among them being those from Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, Microsoft Research India, Microsoft, USA and Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, India. He recently helped Microsoft Research, USA to develop a web based English-Urdu Machine Translation System. Dr Jha has been nominated to some prestigious committees such as to the Board of Directors of World Association for Vedic Studies (WAVES), USA and as an Institutional member of the Steering Committee of FLaReNet (Forum for Language Resource Network), European Commission project, Pisa, Italy.Dr Jha's research interests include Indian languages corpora and standards, Sanskrit and Hindi linguistics, Science & Technology in Sanskrit texts, Computational Lexicography, Machine Translation, e-learning, web based technologies, RDBMS techniques, software design and localization. He has supervised 22 M.Phil. and 8 Ph.D. research students. These include some students from other center of JNU and some other universities. Many dissertations supervised by Dr Jha have been published by Lambert Academic Publisher and Cambridge Scholar Publishing. Dr Jha has about 90 research papers/articles and has several books prominent among those are - Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (ed.), proceedings of the 4th International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium, Springer Verlag, Germany, 2010. Perspectives on the Origin of Indian Civilizations (ed. jointly with Angela Marcantonio), DK Printworld, Delhi, 2012, Modern Perspectives on Vedanta (ed. jointly with Bal Ram Singh, R P Singh, Diwakar Mishra), DK Printworld, Delhi, 2012. He is on editorial board of a leading journal in Computational Linguistics published by Springer. Dr Jha is currently working on a text book on Computational Linguistics to be published by a leading international publisher and also some translations of Sanskrit scientific texts.Dr Jha is heading a Dept. of IT (Govt. of India) funded consortium of 17 Indian universities/institutes for the development of a parallel annotated corpora of Indian languages. He is also working on Sanskrit-Hindi Machine Translation project and shallow parser tools for Indian languages projects funded by Dept. of IT (Govt. of India). Dr Jha has organized several international conferences. The latest being the Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resource and Evaluation (WILDRE), organized in collaboration with Microsoft Research India under Language Resource Evaluation Conference (LREC) organized by European Language Resource Evaluation (ELRA), Istanbul in 2012. and in Reykjavik in 2014