Mysuru: The Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL), a scheme of the Ministry of Education implemented at the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysuru, is organising a National Conference on “Evaluation and Benchmarking of Publicly Available Artificial Intelligence Applications that support Indian Languages’ on Mar. 20 and 21 at CIIL premises in city. The inaugural session begins at 10 am.

The area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently the most happening in the technology sector. Intelligence is mostly defined as the ability to communicate in a language. India is home to so many languages, so it is imperative that the technology is on par in all of them.

The two-day Conference aims to discuss topics related to the evaluation and efficacy of such applications when it comes to Indian languages and brainstorm the issues and challenges in making it better and provide support to all Indian languages.

There will be 25 speakers from across the country, drawn from top-notch academic institutions as well as big players in the industry including representatives from ChatGPT, OpenAI, Ola Krutrim, Bhashini and BharatGen. The paper presenters will deliberate on the major challenges facing Indian languages and how Indian languages can do better on AI-front.

The conference will see the release of new language data sets developed at LDC-IL.

CIIL will also release some multilingual AI and non-AI language tools that would be publicly available. The web-based tools include Anuvadika, a translation engine focused on Indian languages equipped with ASR and TTS modules.

Anuvachika, a Text-to-Speech engine that can be used to readily download speech for any given text in supported Indian languages. Anulekhika, an ASR tool where one speaks and writes or gets a transcription of the uploaded audio files. Lipyantara, a transliteration engine that supports on-the-fly transliteration of text from one Indian script to another Indian script.