Future of Indian Language Technology Research

The Indian government's Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeiTY) has an initiative called 'Technology Development in Indian languages' (TDIL). The objective is to popularise the support for Indian languages on computing platforms. It has been promoting work on machine translation systems—from English to Indian languages and from one Indian language to another, cross-lingual information access, and lptical Character Recognition and handwriting —through a consortium of academic institutions and research organisations for than a decade. Demo versions of products, along with relevant fonts and software for each language, have been developed and were made available through free physical CDs seven years back. The same are now available for download from its data centre website. However, all the offerings are only meant for non-commercial use. Redhat, Google, Microsoft and various small and medium enterprises have been pioneering their own initiatives to popularise Indic computing. Free and lpen source groups have also worked tirelessly to improve support for Indian languages. The involvement of all language computing stakeholders on a FRPPRn SODWIRrP Ln GHfinLng WhH sWrDWHgLF gRDOs DnG DssHssLng WhH outcomes, as well as releasing the results of basic research, tools and language related databases under unrestricted licenses will be a great step for rapid progress.