Topic: Computational Linguistics: A Data Centric Perspective.

Time: 18:00 - 19:30 hours. (High Tea included).

Profile of Dr A Kumaran, Dr A Kumaran currently heads the Multilingual Systems Research group at Microsoft Research India, in Bangalore. He got his bachelors degree from Anna University, Chennai, masters degree from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and the doctoral degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His doctoral research was in the area of Multilingual Database and Information Retrieval Architectures. He has rich and varied work experience – split between India and the US – in environments ranging from research labs to product companies: 4 years in Bell Communications Research, about a dozen years in Oracle Corporation, and currently from 2005, in Microsoft Research. His current research includes machine translation and transliteration systems in Indian languages and tools for multilingual data management & information access.

Short Writeup on Talk: This talk will briefly introduce the area of linguistics and emphasize the need for innovative tools for processing the large amounts of data in natural languages that is getting produced due to the advent of internet. A brief overview of the traditional research methodology's in Computational linguistics will be presented, along with the issues for scaling for a large number of languages. The newer data-centric research methodology's, which emphasize generic systems that learn from appropriate corpora would be presented, along with some examples. The talk will conclude emphasizing the shift in the research methodology's, and the advantages of generic systems trained on language-specific corpora.