CLEAR Dec 2012 Published

The second issue of CLEAR published on December 27, 2012. The magazine in this issue discusses applications of fuzzy logic in NLP, issues of Indian language computing, future of NLP in Human Computer interactions, and Google's driver less cars. This issue also contain an article on GNU Octave by Mr. Razee Marikar, a computer professional with Subex Banglore, and an alumnus of GEC, Sreekrishnapuram. The next issue will be on March 2013.

Read online   or download the e-version.

CLEAR Dec 2012

Open publication - Free publishing - More clear

Talk by Prof. Kalyana Krishnan

A day with "Acharya"

 Prof. Kalyana Krishnan, a retired Professor of IIT Madras and a pioneer in Indian Language Computing, delivered a talk on 28th November, 2012. During the session, he demonstrated the complexity of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The talk was a warm invitation to Indian Language Computing(ILC), and its applications.

Need for Standardization

The session started with a thought-provoking question "What computer can do?". He answered this question in the light of  NLP. Mentioning the scope of Computational Linguistics, he told that "NLP in European Languages is developing interestingly, because they have standards, and central co-ordination. India currently lacks this standardization. Different working groups and organizations in India set their own standards and they are not ready to come to an open standard".  He also gave an introduction to Indian Linguistic traditions by taking examples from Sanskrit and Malayalam.

Aksharas.. not simply characters

Because of the well-structure and well defined set of rules, Sanskrit is highly suitable for linguistic processing by computers. Since most Indian languages are rooted in Sanskrit, computing with Indian Languages is not as complex as with English. But the current state of art contradicts this observation because of  insufficient centralized co-ordination. " We are trying to follow the western NLP technology, which is based on characters. But, our tradition is different. The basic unit of all Indian languages is Akshara, which is a combination of consonants and a vowel.  Limiting our languages to character-level is inadequate", he conveyed.  While discussing the technologies for ILC, he presented the Akshara-based 16-bit encoding scheme for Indian languages developed by IIT-M students. (The details of their work can be seen at acharya website).

No programs should crash

The session concluded by mentioning the importance of good programming style. "Writing a program is not simply applying mathematical formulas. Make it as friendly as possible with the user.  No programs should crash". Professor declared. He advised the students to refer the book " Numerical recipes in C: The art of Scientific Computing ", for a better and different perspective on programming.

Enthusiastic, interactive and motivational

The simple but energetic way of presentation by the veteran teacher  inspired all the students. The talk was mixed with key technology, thought provoking questions, examples and fun, which made everybody interactive. M.Tech students and final year students of B.tech  CSE attended the class. He also had an interactive session with the B.Tech CSE first year students, which inspired them very much.

National Seminar @ Kerala University

Students from SIMPLE Groups attended the National Seminar on Relevance of Malayalam in the Field of Information Technology, jointly conducted by Dept. of Linguistics, Kerala University and KSCSTE, on 1-2 November 2012.  The seminar discusses possible ways to promote the use of Malayalam for the dissemination of information to common people. The two day sessions were chaired by dignitaries like Dr. S Rajendran, Dr. Sarathchandran Nair from the field of Computational Linguistics. In association with VRCLC, IIITM-K, participants from SIMPLE Groups presented their papers. The papers are:

1.  Christopher Augustine, Sibi S, Rajeev R R*, Suleena K**, " Feature Extraction in Malayalam Language ", (* VRCLC, IIITM-K , **SAS SNDP Yogam College, Pathanamthitta)Read
2. Divya S, Rinju O R, Sumi S Nair, *Rajeev R R, **Raja Varma Pamba, " Malayalam Morphological Analyser", (* VRCLC, IIITM-K , **MG University)Read
3. Divya Das, Radhika K, Rajeev R R*, Reghu Raj P C, "Hybrid Sandhi Splitter for Malayalam using Unicode",  (* VRCLC, IIITM-K)Read
4. Ayisha Noori V K, Renuka Babu T, Saani H, Rajeev R R*, “On-line POS Tagger for Malayalam”,         (* VRCLC, IIITM-K)
5. Athira P M, Ancy K Sunny, Pragisha K , Jithesh V.S*., Rajeev R R*, " Trilingual Dictionaries- A Generative Approach ", (* VRCLC, IIITM-K) Abstract 

Divya S and Rinju O R presenting their paper

Sibi presenting the Paper

Pragisha presenting the paper

Radhika and Divya Das presenting their paper.

CLMT: workshop @ Amrita

Computational Engineering and Networking  department of Amrita Viswa Vidhyapeedom organized a one week workshop on Computational Linguistics and Machine Translation(CLMT) from English to Indian Languages. The head of the dept. Dr. Soman inaugurated the program in the presence of Dr. Ramamoorthy (CIIL, Mysore) and Prof. Ramanan (IIIT-H). By hand-overing the tools developed by CEN research team to the chief guests, Dr. Soman officially declared their entry to open source. During the workshop, resourse persons from various institutes delivered their sessions. The main theme of discussion was challenges and issues of machine translation in India. Experiences of the people involved in the development of tools, gave a good understanding of the task to the participants. Including academicians, research scholars and students  from both linguistics and computational background, around 50 people participated. Manu Madhavan, Nibeesh, Robert Jesuraj and Sreejith C represented  SIMPLE groups at CLMT.

Audience

Dr. Ramamoorthy during Presidential Address

Robert, Sreejith, Nibeesh and Manu @ Amrita Campus

Sreejith(2nd from left), Dr. Bhaskaran, Dr. Rajendran, and Manu in front of CEN Labs

Statistical Learing Theory: Lecture by Dr. Mohammed Shahid Abdulla

   

    Thursday 11th October, Dr. Mohammed Shahid Abdulla of IIM-K delivered a lecture on statistical learning theory, for M.Tech students. The class was highly motivational and useful for the participants to get a clear understanding of the concept. Later, he interacted with the students about the research facilities in IIM. Faculty members of Dept. of CSE also attended the program. Dr. Reghu Raj P C, Professor and HOD of CSE , appreciated the way Dr. Shahid handled the class, during his vote of thanks.

Mujeeb Rehman and Dr. P C Reghu Raj presenting memento to Dr. Shahid

CLEAR-Dec 2012-Article Invitation

Student's Innovations in Morphology, Phonology and 

Language Engineering (SIMPLE)-Groups

Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering

Govt. Engineering College, Sreekrishnapuram

Palakkad, 678633

Inviting Article for CLEAR Dec 2012

We are inviting thought-provoking articles, interesting dialogues and healthy debates on multifaceted aspects of Computational Linguistics, for the forthcoming issue of CLEAR ( Computational Linguistics in Engineering And Research) magazine, publishing on Dec 2012. The topics of the articles would preferably be related to the areas of Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval.

The articles may be sent to the Editor on or before 15th November, 2012 through the email simplequest.in@gmail.com.

For more details visit: http://simplegec.blogspot.in

    Representative                                            Editor

    SIMPLE Groups                                         CLEAR Magazine

                                                               

CLEAR-2012 Launching Ceremony

Cover Page: CLEAR Sept 2012

               The first issue of technical magazine CLEAR, an initiative under SIMPLE Group, was released by Principal Prof. Shoukathali on 13th September 2012. The releasing function was arranged at the Principal 's office. In the presence of members of Staff Council, Faculties and staff of Department of CSE, and students of M.Tech CL  the Chief Editor of CLEAR Dr. P. C Reghu Raj ( Professor and Head, Dept. of CSE), handed over the first issue to the Principal.

About CLEAR

               The magazine CLEAR- Computational Linguistics in Engineering And Research- is an on-line magazine, publishing from GEC, Sreekrishnapuram. The magazine aims to discuss different activities in the area of Computational Linguistics and co-ordinate different programs in this area.

               The September issue received articles from researchers and academicians like Dr. Achutshankar, Prof. Jathavedan, Dr.Sudheer Marar etc.

                The magazine is proposed to publish once in the span of three months.  Next issue will launch in month of December, 2012.

For on-line reading click here

Simple but Proud Moments..

Dr. Reghu Raj(left) hand-overing the Magazine to the Principal(Right)

Principal unveiling CLEAR

Principal with CLEAR magazine

CLEAR september 2012

NCILC2012- M.Tech CL got attention

Christopher during his presentation @NCILC12

Christopher Augustine and Manu Madhavan of Team M.Tech presented their papers at NCILC2012, conducted by CUSAT on Feb 19 and 20. Chrstopher presented his paper " HMM basedCollocation Generation"  and Manu presented his paper " Application of Karaka relations in Natural Language Generation". They made connection  with many researchers from various part of India and received appreciation for their presentation. Prof. Kannan of CUSAT, mentioned about the course M.Tech CL at GECSKP, during his speech.

Attended 4th IASNLP Workshop at IIIT-H

(From left)Rechitah, Mujeeb, Manu and Robert @ IASNLP workshop

Manu Madhavan, Mujeeb Rehman, Rechitha and Robert Jesuraj of M.Tech Computational Linguistics attended 4th IASNLP workshop at IIIT-H from 5th to 14th July 2012. This gave a good chance to meet a lot of researchers, academicians and industrialists in NLP, and introduce the course to them. " The classes and the project environment were very inspiring and all those days were intellectually enjoyable ", they expressed.