Auto Trader Zone: Former President Abdul Kalam Launches Machine Translation System

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Former President Abdul Kalam Launches Machine Translation System

The change is upon us and former president Abdul Kalam shows us the way. He has launched http://tdil-dc.in/, Technology Department for Indian Languages (TDIL) Programme. The programme aims to develop information-processing tools to facilitate human machine interaction in Indian languages and to develop technologies to access multilingual knowledge resources and has been initiated by the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of communications & Information Technology, Government of India.

Objectives of TDIL

Research and Development of Language Technology.
Proliferation of Language Technology.
Development of Standards related to Language Technology.

Initiatives have been taken for long term research for the development of the following major areas like

Machine Translation System (link) using which data available in English can be translated to various Indian languages or data can be translated from one Indian language to other Indian language. Only limited Indian languages are in implementation mode.
Optical Character Recognition System using which printed text matter can be converted in editable format.
On-line Handwriting Recognition System using which handwritten data on a tablet device can be converted to editable format.
Cross-lingual Information Access System using which, a user can enter queries in languages they are familiar with and retrieve the document in the same language although the documents are originally created in other language.
Speech Processing System using which, local language digital text can be read out by machine (TTS) and spoken words in a domain can be recognized.

The Department of Information Technology has commenced a national initiative called National Rollout Plan that will aggregate Indian language software tools and fonts. They are being made available through a web based Indian Language Data Centre ILDC (announced at the WWW2011 conference).

Former president Abdul Kalam has also announced the launch of what-can-i-give.in (though the site isn’t accessible now).