IIT Kharagpur Initiative: Tool for Better Bengali Language Experience

Students of the oldest IIT of the country - Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, also known as IIT-Kgp, are presently working on a tool that can create a better online experience for the Bengali users.

Scientists of the institute are in the process of developing resources with the help of Google. The resources so developed will help in finding answers to the queries that come up in the Bengali language. Further, a treebank in the language is proposed to be created.

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How will the tool help?

• A better understanding of the grammatical structure of Bengali language.
• Easy comprehension and definition of the Bengali texts.
• A sentence level as well as word level grammatical analysis tool is being developed by the Computer Science Engineering (CSE) department of IIT-KGP.
• For instance, if a user wishes to know about the flood reports of the state of West Bengal that were made public in newspapers over the last 10 years, the computer tool will be able to prepare a report that has dates, locations plus the steps that the government took to deal with the situation.
• The tool will also be able to answer questions of authors including those from the time of Shri Rabindranath Tagore.
• The tool will further provide easy access to information which is available in Bengali texts.

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A scholar from the department added that the students have been involved in the project while partnering with several other institutes to even develop a cross-language Indian search engine. This project has been named as 'Sandhan'. Essentially, it includes languages such as Gujarati, Odia, Telugu, Assamese and Marathi.