Gurpreet Singh Lehal, Ph.D.

PEOPLE throughout the world have been using computers and Internet in their own languages. So far, Indian users in general and Punjabi users in particular have been compelled to use them in English despite the dominance of Indian engineers and scientists in the IT world. Unless we support our own languages on the technology environments, it is impossible to use IT or internet to uplift and improve the socio-economic environment of our country.

There is a need for language based content and technology and we have to address it. The society at large can benefit from the Information Technology effectively if people can communicate with computers in their own languages. Barely 65 % of our population is literate, of which only an elite minority (~5%) can read, write, and speak the English language. This shuts out most of the Indian population from the worldwide web and its huge potential. Therefore it is essential to have an interface that uses not only the local language but also speech, to cater to the needs of the semi-literate and illiterate sections of the population.

A few government/educational organizations and some individual researchers have initiated programs for the technological development of Punjabi language. A survey of the work done for Punjabi language processing revealed the following facts:
 Scattered work has been done and there is little unification
 Scarcity of linguistic resources and open-source software
 Main organisations working are Punjabi University, Thapar University, CDAC Noida and IIIT Hyderabad
 Many individual researchers are also working on their own without any research support and have published their research in COLING, ICDAR, ICPR and other conferences
 The main sponsoring agency is Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), which has been sponsoring research in areas such as OCR, grammar checker, machine translation etc. In 2000 MCIT setup a Resource Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi at Thapar University, which kick-started research in technical development of Punjabi and encouraged many other researchers in the region to start working in this field.

In this paper the technological development of Punjabi has been classified under certain heads and the research works under taken and successfully completed as well as the products developed are discussed in details.

[Gurpreet Singh Lehal, Ph.D.Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi Language, Literature & Culture, Punjabi University]
 

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