IIT - Kgp with Google to help computers understand Bengali

Kolkata April 14 (IANS) The Indian Institute of Technology - Kharagpur is working with Google to develop a Bengali treebank to help understand grammatical structure of Bengali texts as well as their meaning to enhance the online experience of a Bengali language user a statement said on Friday.

We are trying to create tools and resources for understanding Bengali. Such tools will enable a far better online experience for a Bengali language user and better access to the information available in Bengali texts said Sudeshna Sarkar Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT - Kgp.

A treebank is a collection of texts in which sentences have been exhaustively annotated with syntactic analyses.

The research will enable the computer to read Bengali documents on the user s behalf and find answers.

Citing an example Sarkar said: If you wish to know what are the different flooding events in West Bengal that have been reported in various Bengali newspapers over the past 10 years the computer can prepare a report for you with dates and locations of the events as well as the steps taken by the government.

--IANS
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