By Rubinder Gill

Date:06-09-05

Source: The Tribune

Punjabi University, Patiala, was set up to promote and develop Punjabi. Working on this principle, the efforts of university Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi Language, Literature and Culture bore fruit.

The centre has developed new software for the usage of Punjabi, which has something for the beginner and the specialist, both. If you are new to the language, then the software can help you learn new words, while the specialist can play around and create new terminology with it.

With a click of the mouse, you can search any word, know its root and get other grammatical information. It gives you all possible words formed by a root word noun, gender, number and case, verbs with tense, phase, aspect besides other usage.

The software can identify grammatical attributes of any word in Punjabi. This is the second such software to be developed by the university centre that had earlier developed Gurmukhi-Shahmukhi transliteration software, Sangam.

This software will give a new impetus to technical research in Punjabi and enable it to compete with major languages in the world. CDAC, Pune, pioneer and the largest producer of Indian language software, has offered to buy this software for Rs 1 lakh. To promote the use of Punjabi on computers, CDAC plans large-scale distribution of this software.

The team that developed the Punjabi Morphological Analyser and Generator software was led by Dr Gurpreet Singh Lehal, Director, Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi Language, Literature and Culture.

Coding and database development was by Mandeep Singh Gill, while linguistic support by Dr S. S. Joshi. The database used comprises more than 1.72 lakh words, grouped into 22 classes (such as nouns, personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns, verbs, inflected and uninflected adverbs, inflected and uninflected adjectives, conjunction, besides others).

According to Dr Lehal, morphological analysis and generation are two commonly required and essential tools to start work on computer-based processing of a natural language. The application areas of the software are endless. Some common application areas are automatic spelling and grammar checking, natural language understanding, machine translation, speech recognition and speech synthesis.

The common man can get in-depth information on the correct grammatical usage of all words. It also helps to know the words that can be derived from a single root. The software will be a big aid for researchers as well.