Bangalore
May 7th, 2007

Microsoft Research and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have joined hands to organize a summer school course in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the IISc. The free course held from May 3-17 will consist of lectures by experts from leading Indian academia and abroad and Microsoft researchers. Around 65 people have been accepted for the course out of 175 applicants.

The NLP summer school is intended to motivate undergraduate students, graduate students and research scholars to focus on research in this area. "We want to expose them to this area. We will also have a hands-on lab for he students," said A Kumaran, Microsoft Research.

Speaking at the briefing, Prof N Balakrishnan, who heads the Supercomputer Education and Research Center (SERC) said that there was a shortage of researchers in the area of NLP. "There is a lot of work to be done in Indian language processing. All Indian languages have complex language structures unlike other languages like English. For access to local languages, we should not have language as a barrier. So a community based approach like Wikipedia is important."

He also feels that there is a potential for India to take the lead globally in this space. "If we succeed as a country in breaking the language barrier, there is a potential huge market to address the language opportunity in other countries."

The course will serve as a primer and introduction to people who are interested in knowing about the area. Many academic institutions like Anna University, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kharagpur and CDAC are working on NLP.

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