North Bengal University submitted Nepali words to develop a software

Siliguri, Dec. 6: A group of academicians from North Bengal University has submitted a collection of 15.5 million Nepali words to the department of information and technology to develop a software for the language.

The scholars from the Nepali department of the university have documented a digitised corpus of Nepali words along with a web dictionary and a seedbed spellchecker (a smaller version of spellchecker) that would be helpful for linguistic researchers.

“We were asked to compile a digitised corpus of 15.5 million words by the DIT. A web dictionary has also been designed with a seedbed spellchecker. The project was submitted to the DIT in May and we expect them to release the software soon,” Ghanashyam Nepal, a faculty at the Napali department of NBU and the chief investigator of the project, said.

He added that a group of around 14 scholars had been working on the project for the past three years.

Apart from Nepali, softwares for Assamese, Bodo and Manipuri language are being developed under the central government project.

The project for developing the Nepali software was taken up by NBU in association with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) — a research and development institution in Pune under the DIT.

Nepal is a member of the organisation.

While projects on Assamese and Bodo language were taken up by Gauhati University, the task of compiling the corpus for Manipuri language was done by Manipur University.

“Linguistic researches in Nepali have been carried out on a small scale earlier at the IITs in Hyderabad and Bombay and the Delhi University. But only a few Nepali experts were involved in those projects and they were assisted by some non-Nepali academicians. The work compiled by us is huge and it has been carried out by around 14 experts in the language,” Nepal said.

He added that the source for the compilation was literary, non-literary and scientific journals.

In 2002, the Nepali department of NBU had collaborated with the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education to compile an English-to-Nepali dictionary to reduce mistakes that crept in during translation of Madhyamik question papers in the science stream.

The dictionary of around 3,000 words comprising technical terms in physical science, life science and mathematics was launched in 2005. According to the chief investigator, the Nepali software would be introduced after a final meeting of the DIT officials.

“The software was supposed to be launched by the DIT in June-July. We had contacted DIT officials recently and they said the software would be launched soon,” Nepal said.

-MRINALINI SHARMA

The Telegraph