Recently I got an interesting research paper on Indian Language technology. Title of the paper is “A Journey from Indian Scripts Processing to Indian Language Processing “ by Dr.RMK Sinaha IIT Kanpur. The article appeared in ‘IEEE Annals of the History of Computing’ . The author is a pioneer and leading researcher in Indian Language Processing. Without his contribution Indian Language Technologies might not have been matured this much. I am not going to put any comment on his writing, because I am a humble disciple of Dr.RMK .

The article is pretty much larger one (24 pages). I will just give the main points which discussed in the paper. The article begins with a good short and informative introduction to Indian languages. In the introductory section he discusses digital divide and its impacts in a multilingual country like India.Then he directly proceeds to the features of Indian scripts. In this section he discusses the logic of conjunct formation of Indian languages, similarities and dissimilarities in Indic scripts. The ‘script composition grammar’ of Indic languages are also discussed in this section. In the next section he discusses the history of printing in india. The developments from printing to computers. Developments regarding the typewriter for Devenagri is discussed in detail. Then he proceeds to the efforts in the computer processing of Indian Languages by IIT Kanpur and other people. He narrated the history of Integrated Devenagri Computer(IDC) and GIST technology, the evolution if ISCII, ISFOC and InScript standards. Detailed history of GIST/ISM technology is given in the article. A brief description on the history of Indian Language word processors are also there in the article. An account of the OCR technology for Indian language is also found in the article. Then he directly proceeds to the developments of other Natural Language Processing activities in India.

Definitely the article is a historical account of Indian Language Technology, which every person who is working in Indian Language Technology should read.

Bibliographic Details :

A Journey from Indian Scripts Processing to Indian Language Processing Sinha, R.M.K.; Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE Volume 31, Issue 1, Jan.-March 2009 Page(s):8 - 31 Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAHC.2009.1

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