Punjabi University, Patiala, to develop language tools for Dari, Kashmiri, Pashto

Tribune News Service

Patiala, September 6

The Research Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi language, Punjabi University, Patiala, will now develop language processing tools for Kashmiri, Dari, Balochi and Pashto. The department had earlier provided IT solutions for Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and Sindhi languages. The university is also expected to rope-in students from Afghanistan studying at the university.

Gurpreet Singh Lehal, professor and director of the centre, said this would bridge the scripts and language barrier between communities in the Indian sub-continent.

He said, “Under the initiative language processing tools and linguistic resources such as corpus, typing tools, word predictors, generic font and storage code converters, digital dictionaries and transliteration tools will be developed for these languages.”

Vishal Goyal, professor at the Department of Computer Science, said: “A few research scholars from Afghanistan studying at Punjabi University and neighbouring institutes will be roped in and involved in development of these linguistic resources.”

The university had earlier facilitated electronic and written communication between Punjabi, Sindhi and Urdu speaking communities living in India and Pakistan through the development of bi-directional web-based transliteration tools with help of international grants by Pan Asia ICT (Singapore) and ISIF Asia (Australia).

Officials said their resources for languages including typing tools, font and storage code converters, text corpus and optical character recognition systems are also very popular among writers, newspapers and publishers in India and Pakistan for composing and transliterating articles, news, and digital online content.