Research Topics - Natural Language Processing

The group is currently working on the following topics:

We have implemented a Tamil - Hindi MT system which is based on the anusaaraka system developed at IIIT, Hyderabad. An online translation service of this system is available.

An automated system for Tamil morphological analysis has been implemented with an API . The morphological analyser and generator are integrated in a finite-state automata implementation. The current accuracy of the morph analyzer on the 3 million word CIIL Tamil corpus is >95%. An online demo of this is available.

A computationally amenable phrase structure grammar (PSG) for Tamil is being developed. This is done in analogy to existing PSG's in English, the idea being that transfer rules from one grammar to another will be used to remap parse trees from source to target language. Together with feature-based unification and the morphological analyzer, this forms the essence of the core design of the English -Tamil bidirectional MT system. An alpha-version of this system is expected by the summer of 2003. The prototype version of the English - Tamil MT system is available online.

A Tamil Search Engine has been developed and an online demo is available. A new version (under development) will have increased speed, improved ranking and a host of other new features.

A named entity extraction module has been developed to identify chemical names and protein names from medical abstracts. This modules forms a part of a Information Extraction system.

Lexical resources are also being developed to initiate statistical parsing in Tamil. This is being done in coordination with other members of the TransLexGram project. 5000 English words (in their various senses and categories, a total of ~8000) with associated sentences have been manually translated into Tamil. An online searchable display of the TrandLexGram is available.

POS tagging is being carried out as part of the AnnCorra project. Semi automated tools with GUI has been developed to tag the sentences. Display tools were also developed to view the parse tree representation of the sentences.

We are collaborating with Dr. S Rajendran of Thanjavur Tamil University, on a Tamil WordNet. This is being developed on the similar lines of the English WordNet developed by Princeton Universiy. Plans are afloat to interconnect this with the Hindi WordNet and the English WordNet.