big trends

DOI:10.1145/3343456

BY PUSHPAK BHATTACHARYYA, HEMA MURTHY,
SURANGIKA RANATHUNGA, AND RANJIVA MUNASINGHE
Indic
Language
Computing
IN APRIL 2019, following the Easter Sunday bomb
attacks, the Government of Sri Lanka had to shut
down Facebook and You Tube for nine days to stop
the spreading of hate speech and false news, posted
mainly in the local languages Sinhala and Tamil.
This came about simply because these social media
platforms did not have the capability to detect and
warn about the provocative content.

India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) wants lectures on Swayama and NPTELb—the online teaching platforms—to be translated into all Indian languages. Approximately 2.5 million students use the Swayam lectures on computer science alone. The lectures are in English, which students find difficult to understand. A large number of lectures are manually subtitled in English. Automatic speech recognition and machine translation into Indian languages will be great enablers for the marginalized sections of society.

Requirements like these are real and abundant.

a https://swayam.gov.in/ b https://nptel.ac.in/

These are social and commercial needs, whose servicing requires user interaction and information dissemination in languages other than English. Only around 10% of India’s population, or about 125 million people, can speak English; only about half that number is comfortable reading and writing in that language. The social media activity of the youth of the Indian subcontinent (where 65% of the population is below the age of 35) generates a huge amount of e-content, much of which is in text form, is multilingual, and even code-mixed (text in multiple languages at the same time, often in Roman script). The numbers are mind-boggling:c

˲ 462.1 million Internet users (34% of
the population; the global average is 53%).

˲ 430.3 million users access the Internet via mobile devices (79% of total Web traffic).

˲ 250 million social media users (19% of the population; the global average is 42%).

˲ 260 million WhatsApp users, and 53 million Instagram users.

Sri Lanka alone has seven million Internet users (2018 data), which equates to a penetration of 32%.

There is no doubt that speech and natural language processing (NLP) of Indic languages is hugely important and relevant, and has the potential to influence the lives and activity of at least 20% of the world’s population.

Challenges of Indian

Language Computing

The Indian subcontinent is divided into seven independent countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.

There are approximately 1,599 languages in India, out of which about 420–440 are in active use. Languages in the region fall into four major linguistic groups: Indo-Aryan (spoken mainly in the northern part of south Asia and in Sri Lanka), Dravidian (spoken mainly in south India), Tibeto-Burman ( spoken mainly in northeast India), and

 

c India Today, April 2018 issue.

IMAGE BY JOAT