1. Where do we stand? Harold Somers Centre for Computational Linguistics, UMIST, Manchester, England Panel session, MT Summit VIII, September 2001

2. Part I: the other 6,000+ languages LE R&D has focussed on a dozen or so languages of major commercial interest Many other languages equally “deserving” Not just MT but large range of LE resources needed

3. Which languages? “Minority” languages NIMLs (non-indigenous minority languages) –Immigrants –Refugees –Asylum seekers E.g. Languages of Indian subcontinent, and Africa Hardly “minority” languages

4. Example of Hindi 180 million speakers in India Spoken as first language in Northern States 400-700 million speakers worldwide 450,000 speakers in Britain Hindi-Urdu - if taken together (!) #2 in world, ahead of English

5. Translation software - What would you expect? Word processing Fonts Hyphenation Spell checker Style checker Mono-/bilingual on-line dictionary Multi-lingual on-line dictionary Thesaurus (i.e. synonym dictionary) Terminology Translation memory Computer-aided translation MT

6. Translation software - what is available? Word processing Fonts But not much else

7. What can we do about it? Long term: computational linguistics research on a wider variety of languages Short term: make use of existing resources (corpora, MRDs, web pages) and extract linguistic data from them

8. Part II: India - the forgotten jewel Three visits to India earlier this year –MT workshop in Kanpur –NLP workshop in Kolkata –Anglo-Indian summit in Mumbai Several major groups working on NLP, including MT Government initiatives

9. India’s problem 13 official languages Using 6 different writing systems Special status of English Widespread low levels of literacy Introspective focus vis a vis interlingual communication

10. Problems being addressed Agreed exchange formats for writing systems OCR for writing systems Speech recognition (including Indian English) Word processing and related packages (dictionaries, spell checkers)

11. Contd. Terminology Corpus collection MT and CAT tools –English <> Hindi –Between Indian languages