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IIT-Kgp, Google tie-up to help computers understand Bengali

The Indian Institute of Technology – Kharagpur is working with Google to develop a Bengali treebank to help understand grammatical…

IIT-Kgp, Google tie-up to help computers understand Bengali

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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.

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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."

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