Tamil NLP workshop Report(Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai), 3rd - 7th January 2011

The regional workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) was conducted by LDC-IL at the Department of Linguistics, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai i.e. from 3rd - 7th January 2011. The program was as follows:

• 3rd January 2011

The program was inaugurated by the Head, Department of Linguistics, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai. The School of Tamil Studies, the professors of the various Departments along with all research scholars attended this NLP program.

On the first day, there was a presentation by Mr. Thennarasu, S. on the introduction about LDC-IL and its contribution in the area of Language Technology for Indian Languages.

• 4th January 2011

On the second day of the workshop, there was a presentation by Ms. Amudha and discussion was held observation POS tagging for Tamil.

• 5th January 2011

On the third day, there was a presentations by L. R. Prem Kumar on Morphological Analyzer for Tamil.

• 6th January 2011

On the fourth day, there was a presentations by Thennarasu, S. on Corpus and their use in Language Technology and demo of LDC-IL (Corpus Analyses) tools.

• 7th January 2011

On the last day of the workshop, there was a presentation by Dr. R. Prabagaran on An Introduction to Speech Annotation using Praat and Participants discussed on the issues of POS Tagset, Morphological Analyzer, Corpus Collection and Cleaning. And finally, the Certificates were distributed to the participants in the valedictory function.

This was an awareness raising workshop of LDC-IL. It aimed to create awareness and be better informed about the activities of LDC-IL. The participants were asked to comment on the approaches and the outcome of the workshop through feedback forms. About 100 participants participated in the workshop. Participants from both the disciplines humanities and science had participated. They have understood the importance of corpus data for the empirical study in Linguistics and Language Technology.