LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 11 : 5 May 2011
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

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Parsing in Indian Languages

Editors
Kommaluri Vijayanand, MCA and L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D. (Linguistics)

Preface

Ancient Indian grammarians excelled themselves in identifying the components of sentences and grouping them in terms of their structural meaning/s as well as contextual meaning/s in utterances. Their practices assumed certain language universals across human languages. At the same time, they were always aware of the specific features of individual languages. Sanskrit grammatical traditions influenced the development of grammars in several languages such as Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. The Tamil ancient tradition followed its own course in most areas and developed its own descriptive technical terms and language-specific features of the Tamil language. However, in both the traditions, parsing played a very important role.

Parsing stands for the processes of analysis applied on sentences to identify its constituents. Generally speaking, parsing may be described as the process of identifying the parts of speech, analysis of sentence and sentence types and their constituents. Universal as well as language-specific features may be identified through parsing. An important requirement, often ignored after the introduction of the teaching of English grammar in Indian schools, is the emphasis on language-specific features that are often context-sensitive as well as based on semantic and lexical relations peculiar to a language. English school grammar began to dominate the thinking of the educated people in India. Native grammar traditions also focused more on the earlier stages of the language as exemplified in traditionally respected grammar books.

Modern structural linguistics enabled us to overcome these two limitations and to look at linguistic structures from descriptive and distributional points of views current usage. Further developments within linguistics such as the emergence of the generative grammar models, etc. along with the emergence of computer science and programming, have given us new insights into the processes and models of parsing. In addition, we now recognize that in order to take the benefits of computing, to a variety of languages, we need closer scrutiny and formalization of parsing of target languages.

India has many languages and a good number of these may be termed as major languages in terms of the expansive nature of their use in various fields. Use and development of a variety programmes for the efficient use of computer and computing in these languages will be better achieved if we do the parsing of the syntactic and semantic structures of these languages using well developed concepts and practices of parsing dealing with the universal and specific features of these languages.

The present volume of papers is an attempt to take up some important problems in the field of parsing and apply these techniques to some Indian languages. We do believe that this volume will help both teachers and students of Computer Science courses in Indian Universities. These papers will help Indian researchers and software engineers to continue to identify specific features of Indian languages and find solutions to solve them.

These papers were presented in the National Seminar on Lexical Resources and Computational Techniques on Indian Languages organized by the Department of Computer Science during 04th and 05th October 2010 in Pondicherry University.

Our grateful thanks are due to the following:

Prof. J.A.K. Tareen, Vice-Chancellor, Pondicherry University for his consistent support and encouragement extended to us for hosting this National Seminar on Lexical Resources and Computational Techniques on Indian Languages on the campus. Our gratitude is extended to our sponsors The Department of Information Technology under the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, Government of India, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore and Department of Science, Technology and Environment, Government of Puducherry.

Prof. Rajesh Sachdeva, Director, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore had inaugurated the Seminar and motivated the research community with his inspirational inaugural address stressing on mobilizing young scholars to become part of the mission of translation.

We are thankful to Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharya, Department of Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Mumbai is instrumental in motivating the young research scholars towards contributing one's resources to the translation mission.

We extend our gratitude to Prof. Rajeev Sangal, Director, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, Prof. V. Prithiviraj, Dean (i/c), School of Engineering and Technology, Pondicherry University, Prof. R. Subramanian, Prof. Kavi Narayana Murthy, Prof. Panchanan Mohanty, Prof. G. Umamaheswara Rao of University of Hyderabad and Thiru. S. Loganathan, Registrar, Thiru. S. Raghavan, Finance Officer of Pondicherry University.

Vijayanand Kommaluri, M.C.A.
L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

This is only the Editors' Preface for the Volume. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE VOLUME IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Kommaluri Vijayanand, MCA
Department of Computer Science
Pondicherry University
Pondicherry - 605014, India
kvpudu@gmail.com

L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D. (Linguistics)
Central Institute of Indian Languages
Ministry of Education, Government of India
Mysore 570 006, India
ramamoorthy@ciil.stpmy.soft.net
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