Professor
R Kalyana Krishnan, one among the most reputed Professors of IIT
Madras visited our college on 16th of September 2014. Prof. Kalyana
Krishnan was retired from IIT Madras in March 2011 after a long
service lasting nearly four decades. He visited our college and delivered
expert talks on various engineering fields for both postgraduate and
undergraduate students.
Interaction
with PG students began by afternoon as per the schedule. Both the
first and second year M.tech Computational Linguistics batch students
attended the class. The talk was centered around text processing and
various issues associated with it. After providing a short
introduction on the mathematical basis provided to text processing,
the discussion advanced to the much anticipated Multilingual text
processing.
The
question "Which is the most frequent alphabet in Malayalam
text?" made us realize that we know only a little about our own
mother tongue. Prof. Kalyana Krishnan also found time to compare
English with Malayalam. English has only 26 alphabets compared to
Malayalam, where a careful study would reveal that the actual
numbers, also counting koottaksharam, are way beyond what we have
imagined. This fact might bias us towards English as it is easy to
learn comparatively, but this easiness comes with a cost. For all
those who are familiar with language processing in English would
easily find that there exist a long list of homophones that makes
text to speech a tedious task in English. Prof. Kalyana Krishnan
emphasized the point that no two person would pronounce the same text
differently in Malayalam. That is, there exists no homophones in
Malayalam, a quality that we should all be proud of. This is not
incidental but rather by the design of Malayalam "Aksharas".
Its meaning (not moving, stationary, non ambiguous) itself explains
this fact.
Later
the talk proceeded with issues regarding the character encodings in
Malayalam, mostly the ones associated with Koottaksharams. Then the
Professor made us realize the beauty of Malayalam and asked us to
envy the expertise with which the Indian literatures were written.
The beauty of Indian literature further drove the discussions towards
the Rama Krishna Viloma Kavyam, a sloka build of palindromes,
containing as long as 64 slokas, that depicts the chronicles of Lord
Krishna when read in one direction and that of Rama when read in the
opposite direction. The excellence of the epic Mahabharatha was the
other interesting literary work that came into our discussion. The
ancient literature in India was magnificent in many aspects like
conveying more ideas in the forms of short slokas. The knowledge that
every 1000th sloka in Mahabharatha had dual meanings and the reason
behind it, was absolutely new to us.
The
Professor, before concluding our short session, asked the students to
sent a mail to his personal mail id that describes what each of us
perceived from his class. This is a practice which he had always
asked from his students, to make them improve the way they express
themselves. Professor did also found himself time to reply and
suggest some further readings to all those who mailed him their
experience and what they understood from the talk.
Opportunities
like this where we could share our thoughts and ideas with experts
like Prof. Kalyana Krishnan comes rarely in a lifetime. We, the
students of M.Tech CL is hence sincerely thankful to our department
and our Head of the department for providing us such an opportunity.
