Where do we stand?

Harold SomersCentre for Computational Linguistics,

UMIST, Manchester, England

Panel session, MT Summit VIII, September 2001

Part I: the other 6,000+ languages

• LE R&D has focussed on a dozen or so languages of major commercial interest

• Many other languages equally “deserving”• Not just MT but large range of LE resources needed

Which languages?• “Minority” languages• NIMLs (non-indigenous minority languages)

– Immigrants– Refugees– Asylum seekers

• E.g. Languages of Indian subcontinent, and Africa• Hardly “minority” languages

Example of Hindi

• 180 million speakers in India• Spoken as first language in Northern States• 400-700 million speakers worldwide• 450,000 speakers in Britain• Hindi-Urdu - if taken together (!) #2 in world, ahead of

English

Translation software - What would you expect?• Word processing• Fonts• Hyphenation• Spell checker• Style checker• Mono-/bilingual on-line dictionary• Multi-lingual on-line dictionary• Thesaurus (i.e. synonym dictionary)• Terminology• Translation memory• Computer-aided translation• MT

Translation software - what is available?

• Word processing• Fonts• • • • • • • But not much else

What can we do about it?

• Long term: computational linguistics research on a wider variety of languages

• Short term: make use of existing resources (corpora, MRDs, web pages) and extract linguistic data from them

Part II: India - the forgotten jewel

• Three visits to India earlier this year– MT workshop in Kanpur– NLP workshop in Kolkata– Anglo-Indian summit in Mumbai

• Several major groups working on NLP, including MT• Government initiatives

India’s problem

• 13 official languages• Using 6 different writing systems• Special status of English• Widespread low levels of literacy• Introspective focus vis a vis interlingual communication

Problems being addressed

• Agreed exchange formats for writing systems• OCR for writing systems• Speech recognition (including Indian English)• Word processing and related packages (dictionaries,

spell checkers)

Contd.

• Terminology• Corpus collection• MT and CAT tools

– English <> Hindi– Between Indian languages