IIIT adds Shakti to the web

HYDERABAD: Government translation departments throughout the country will soon have an opportunity to lighten their burden for free. International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, is close to making Shakti, a machine translation program, available on the web.

Associate Professor Dipti Misra Sharma and her group of research students have been working on the program for over a year now. “This multi-target system is ready to use and its URL has been circulated among 200 people to gauge for accuracy and efficiency,” said IIIT director Rajiv Sangal adding that “After the experimental run is through in about a month or so it would be available free on the web.”

Made with an objective to overcome the language barriers, the Machine Translation Program focuses on Indian languages along with an African language. “An African language has been included only to prove a point that it will work for just about any language and not just Indian regional languages,” said Sangal.

However, the uniqueness of the program lies in the fact that as and when a single language is worked upon the consequent improvement on all the other languages is immediate and without any extra input. This implies: if Marathi component is improved then Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, automatically improves resulting in a big leap in translation jobs.

In the Natural Language Processing area, a couple of other interesting projects are also underway at the Institute. Of which speech synthesizer for Indian languages is of particular interest as its applications are very wide.

“We have got a good output for Telugu and Hindi,” said Rohit, a researcher at the speech-processing lab. One possible application that the team is working on is text-to-speech for tourists. “It can work as a guide,” said Rohit. Made available on a handheld device the synthesizer so far helps in one-way communication wherein the tourist can ask general questions by selecting it from the menu and it will be spoken in the specified language.