Linguistic Data Consortium For Indian Languages (LDC-IL), Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore in collaboration with Department of Linguistics, Madurai Kamaraj University organized a five days National Seminar cum Workshop for Assistant Professors and Research Scholars on ‘Linguistic Knowledge in Language Technology’. The Inaugural function was held at Sethupathi Arangu on 21st November 2011. Dr. M. Rajiakodi, Registrar (i/c), Madurai Kamaraj University presides over the function and delivered the inaugural address. He has centered his speech on the importance of the usage of computers in this modern world. He said that Education without the knowledge of computer is invaluable. Those who are not having knowledge of computers are considered to be illiterates. He also stressed the importance of three things in life 1. Improvement of communication 2. Improvement the computer knowledge or acquire more about computer knowledge 3. Personality Development.

          Dr. L. Ramamoorthy, Head, LDC-IL gave a brief sketch on the activities of the LDC-IL, CIIL, Ministry of HRD, Mysore. He pointed out the critical situation of the languages of India which are yet to brought to the next level. He insisted the importance of Machine Translation and the use of language Technology to preserve the endangered languages. He further stressed the role of linguistics in the development of language technology and also pointed out that the development of Computer analysed computer-mediated grammar is the objective of the LDC-IL.

          The programme was organized for five days from 21st – 25th November 2011. May illuminating and provoking lectures on the topics such as Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Approaches to NLP, Corpus Linguistics, Encoding and Balanced Corpus, Linguistic Knowledge and Corpus Extraction, Linguistic Analaysis, Local word grouping , POS Tagging, Speech Annotation, SpellChecker, WordNet and Syntactic Parsing were given by eminent professors viz. G.Ravisankar, V.Thiruvalluvan, K.Rangan, V.Renuga Devi, S.Arulmozi, S.Rajendran, V.Dhanalakshmi, R.Vijay, N.Deiva Sundaram, M.Ganesan, S.Thennarasu and R.Prabagaran.

          Dr. A.Athithan, Head, Department of Linguistics, MKU gave the Welcome address and Dr.V.Renuga Devi, Professor, the organizing secretary of the programme proposed the Vote of Thanks.

          Nearly 60 participants hailing from different universities like Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, Pondicherry, Bharathiyar University, Coimbatore, Tamil University, Thanjavur, International Institute of Tamil Studies, Chennai, Annamalai University, Chidambaram, Madurai Kamaraj University and from various colleges in Madurai attended the seminar cum workshop. All those participants felt the seminar cum workshop was very informative, useful and taught provoking.

          The valedictory function was held at Sethupathi Arangu on 25th November 2011. Mr.S.Thennarasu, Sr. Lecturer in LDC-IL, gave the welcome address. Dr.K.Pasumpon, Assistant director, Tamil Development presides over the function. Prof.M.Ganesan, CAS in Linguistics, Annamalai University gave the Valedictory address.  Prof.V.Renuga Devi the organizing secretary of the programme gave the vote of thanks. The seminar cum workshop came to an end with the remarks from the participants that programme have to be conducted periodically for the benefit of young scholars who are working in the field of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.