Govt forms society to develop software in Bangla

8220;The Society for Natural Language Technology Research SNLTR is a part of government8217;s initiative to popularise Bengali language and literature with the help of modern information technology,8221; IT Minister Debesh Das said.

The IT department has already sanctioned Rs 1 crore for one year to the society, which is currently located at Salt Lake. The society has one government representative in its managing body.

For a start, SNLTR in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur and a private software development company will soon release 8220;Baishakhi8221;, a standardised Bangla Linux distribution software in public

domain.

The software will allow office computation in Bangla along with a Bengali spell check system integrated with the Bangla Linux system.

8220;The society is working on standardisation of Bengali codes and a unicode compliant Bangla keyboard layout,8221; Das said. Computer experts believe that Bangla texts lack standardisation, which makes the output neither universally accessible nor usable, unlike English. The society promises to make Bengali user-friendly on computers and create language resources, systems and devices.

SNLTR, in collaboration with Bengal Engineering and Science University, has begun work on a Bangla dictionary and a word list in accordance with the Paschim Banga Bangla Academy spelling convention.

The society plans to host 15,000 pages of Rabindra Rachanabali in unicode format on its website.

With IIT Kharagpur as its research centre, the society will also create a search engine of indexed and categorised Bengali literary works.

8220;We will also create a script of Tagore8217;s musical notes in a computer software format. We are taking the help of IIT Kharagpur in this endeavour,8221; said professor Dwijesh Kumar Dutta Majumder, president, SNLTR.

8220;We will collect multidimensional databases of modern Bangla texts in electronic format and analyse them with the help of computer technology,8221; Majumder added.

The research centre will also develop tools and software like optical character recognition system for printed Bengali script to assess the accuracy of scripts.