MINUTES OF THE FIRST PROJECT ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING OF LINGUISTIC DATA CONSORTIUM FOR INDIAN LANGUAGES (LDC-IL) HELD ON JUNE 5, 2007 FROM 12.00 NOON TO 4.00 P.M.

MEMBERS PRESENT

Top

MEMBERS ABSENT

Top

1. Welcome and Introduction about LDC-IL:

          Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh, Director, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore made a detailed presentation about the New Initiatives of the CIIL during the Eleventh Plan Period including LDC-IL and its relation with other projects and welcomed the members of the LDC-IL PAC for the first meeting.

2. Language Resources at CIIL

      a. Speech: Ms. Rekha Sharma made a brief presentation about the work done by the Speech Sciences Group of the Institute.

      b. Text: Dr. B. Mallikarjun made a presentation about Corpora Creation, maintenance in the area of Text and Speech at the Central Institute of Indian Languages.

3. Prescribed Measurable & Monitorable Outputs for the year 2007-08:

      a. Before taking up this item, the members sought clarification regarding the structure of the Project Advisory Committee and its role in the functioning of the LDC-IL. 

          (i) It was clarified that the PAC is the Apex Body for guiding the activities of the LDC-IL including monitoring the work of the implementation agencies. 

          (ii) The Project Advisory Committee can form Sub-Committees to look into the different aspects of the work of the LDC-IL.  Though it is proposed to have 2 meetings per annum, if need be, it can meet more than 2 times in a year. It was suggested that in the first year, the number of meetings could be more than two.

          (iii) This being the first Project Advisory Committee meeting of the LDC-IL, it can set tone for the kind of its involvement in the guidance of the work on Indian Languages.

          (iv) It can also take decisions relating to the fees structure (elucidated in the project proposal). 

As desired by the members present, the copy each of the Project Proposal and Minutes of the SFC were given to all the members.

          b. The difference between the LDC-IL of the Central Institute of Indian Languages and the Consortium Projects of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology is that in case of the Central Institute of Indian Languages the deliverables are Corpus in different Indian Languages for Speech and Text and in case of the Ministry of Communication & Information Technology the deliverables are Systems or Tools.

          c. It was agreed to form five groups to look into the aspects of standardization, implementation, plan for monitoring, quantum, languages, purchase of Corpus and other issues under each areas. (It was also agreed that each group would co-opt other specialists in the field).

Top

Committee 1:  Licensing Issues:

     1. Dr. Hemant Darbari, C-DAC Pune
     2. Shri Abhijit Dutta, IBM India, Haryana
     3. Shri Pradeep Parappil, MICROSOFT, Haryana
     4. Dr. B. Mallikarjun, LDC-IL, CIIL, Mysore.

     (Others to be Co-opted)

Committee 2:  Natural Language Processing

1. Prof. Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad
2. Dr. Hemant Darbari, C-DAC Pune
3. Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharya

      (Others to be Co-opted)

Committee 3: Speech

1. Prof. Hema Murthy, IIT, Chennai
2. Prof. Peri Bhaskararao, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Japan
3. Mr. Ashwin Gopalakrishnan, Motorola
4. Ms. Rekha Sharma, CIIL

     (Others to be Co-opted)

Committee 4: Character Recognition

1. Dr. B. B. Chaudhuri, ISI, Kolkata
2. Shri Shantanu Choudhuri
3. Shri Mahesh Kulkarni, C-DAC Pune
4. Shri A.G. Ramakrishna (Online Handwriting Recognition)

      (Others to be co-opted)

Committee 5: Speech Deficiencies

1. Prof. Vijayalakshmi  Basavaraj, AIISH, Mysore
2. Ms. Smruthi,   SNDT University, Pune
3. Ms. D. Vasanta, Osmania University, Hyderabad
4. Prof. Peri Bhaskararao, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Japan.

Top

These Working Groups will prepare the reports relating to languages to be covered, scope of the work, standardization, quality of data, financing  model, open source/community model,  different layers, end users , fees structures for R & D purpose, acknowledgement, buying and selling data  and all other issues relating to the concerned area as the groups may deem fit. 

These Working Groups will submit their reports by mid of August 2007 and the PAC will meet during mid September 2007 to take stock of the situation and decide on the reports of the Working Groups.

d. The Institute will call for Intent of Expression from scholars and institutions in the field to work on different aspects of Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL) through newspapers, press release, web sites, State IT Departments, Circulars to Language Technology Institutions and through word of mouth including items/posters to be sent to different Indian Language Data Centre (ILDC). 

e. The project proposals will be received up to August 31, 2007 and they will be placed before the PAC Meeting during mid September 2007.  Receipt of proposals will be continuous and an on-going activity.

f. Dr. B. Mallikarjun gave details of proposed work relating to languages in the North-East being taken up by the LDC-IL for creating both Speech and Text Corpora out of NE funds of LDC-IL.

g. Indian English Data and Pronunciation Dictionary would also become part of the work of LDC-IL.

4. Proposed International Seminar, National Seminars/Events, Workshops, Training Programmes, Academic Meetings, Tasks, Projects etc.:

The e-mail sent by Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharya was considered.
           
It was agreed that the following programs would be conducted:

1. Workshop on Corpora Creation and Tagging, Prof. Uma Maheshwara Rao
2. Spoken Language Deficiency Workshop by AIISH, Mysore
3. One Regional Seminar by C-DAC, Pune
4. One International Seminar from January 7, 2008 by Prof. Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad.
5. Workshops by IIT, Bombay (Lexicon and WordNet, Morphology Analysis, Corpus Linguistics) by Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharya.
6. Workshop on Speech Recognition by  IBM
7. The project proposal of Prof.  Kavi Narayana Murthy regarding Tagging Telugu Corpora was considered and it was decided to ask the proposer to send the revised proposal so that the deliverables are clearly stated for the period of 6 to 8 months.

Top

5. Any other Item with the permission of the Chair:

(1) The project proposals by different people could involve task driven fellowships.  It was agreed that both individuals and institutions can apply for the projects.

(2) Infrastructure: It was observed that the designations as given in the proposal (Scientists A to D) did not correspond to the Govt. of India designation for Scientists.  It was, therefore, decided that all the positions listed under the project will be equated with the positions already existing in the CIIL and re-designated accordingly.

(3) The Director, CIIL has been authorized by the SFC to take necessary steps to recruit people and he has decided to have one Administration/Finance person and one Technical person to begin with so that the work could be initiated, the same were noted by the Committee.

(4) It was agreed that henceforth the CIIL will play a pivotal role in encoding language, yet to be encoded languages in the UNICODE.

(5) Prof. Rajeev Sangal communicated the opinion of Prof. Raj Reddy for providing low cost servers by TB size. The Chair-person agreed to consider this option.

The meeting ended with vote of thanks by Dr. B. Mallikarjun.