Language data is the key ingredient in terms of research and development in the area of language technology. As the time goes by, an increasing number of researchers are seeing the potential benefits of the use of an electronic corpus as a source of empirical language data for their research. The issues surrounding collection, processing and annotation of the quantities of linguistic data make it necessary to involve a number of disciplines like linguistics, computer science, statistics, engineering etc. Corpus linguists, as we all know, often use computational methods when analyzing their data whereas the computational linguists are dependent on computer-readable linguistic data to use in their research and in building practical tools and programmes. The data from a large number of Indian languages thus collected will be of high quality with defined standards. This has been on demand for a long time in India which will now come true.
In order to fulfill this long-pending need, the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore and several other like-minded institutions working on Indian Languages technology like Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, etc., have now been allowed by the Government of India to set up a Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL). The scheme has now been approved by the Planning Commission.
This consortium, being set up in the lines of the LDC at the University of Pennsylvannia (USA), will not only create and manage large Indian languages databases, it will also provide a forum for researchers in India and other countries working on Indian languages to publish and build products for use based on such databases that would not otherwise be possible.
LDC-IL is expected to:
