Text-to-Speech synthesis in Indian languages has a seen lot of progress over the decade partly due to the annual Blizzard challenges. These systems assume the text to be written in Devanagari or Dravidian scripts which are nearly phonemic orthography scripts. However, the most common form of computer interaction among Indians is ASCII written transliterated text. Such text is generally noisy with many variations in spelling for the same word. In this paper we evaluate three approaches to synthesize speech from such noisy ASCII text: a naive Uni-Grapheme approach, a Multi-Grapheme approach, and a supervised Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) approach. These methods first convert the ASCII text to a phonetic script, and then learn a Deep Neural Network to synthesize speech from that. We train and test our models on Blizzard Challenge datasets that were transliterated to ASCII using crowdsourcing. Our experiments on Hindi, Tamil and Telugu demonstrate that our models generate speech of competetive quality from ASCII text compared to the speech synthesized from the native scripts. All the accompanying transliterated datasets are released for public access.

This paper describes Centre for Development of Advanced Computing's (CDACM) submission to the shared task-'Tool Contest on POS tagging for Code-Mixed Indian Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp) Text', collocated with ICON-2016. The shared task was to predict Part of Speech (POS) tag at word level for a given text. The code-mixed text is generated mostly on social media by multilingual users. The presence of the multilingual words, transliterations, and spelling variations make such content linguistically complex. In this paper, we propose an approach to POS tag code-mixed social media text using Recurrent Neural Network Language Model (RNN-LM) architecture. We submitted the results for Hindi-English (hi-en), Bengali-English (bn-en), and Telugu-English (te-en) code-mixed data.

This paper discusses the experiments carried out by us at Jadavpur University as part of the participation in ICON 2015 task: POS Tagging for Code-mixed Indian Social Media Text. The tool that we have developed for the task is based on Trigram Hidden Markov Model that utilizes information from dictionary as well as some other word level features to enhance the observation probabilities of the known tokens as well as unknown tokens. We submitted runs for Bengali-English, Hindi-English and Tamil-English Language pairs. Our system has been trained and tested on the datasets released for ICON 2015 shared task: POS Tagging For Code-mixed Indian Social Media Text. In constrained mode, our system obtains average overall accuracy (averaged over all three language pairs) of 75.60% which is very close to other participating two systems (76.79% for IIITH and 75.79% for AMRITA_CEN) ranked higher than our system. In unconstrained mode, our system obtains average overall accuracy of 70.65% which is also close to the system (72.85% for AMRITA_CEN) which obtains the highest average overall accuracy.

Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) has become an important problem to solve in the recent years due to the growth of content in multiple languages in the Web. One of the standard methods is to use query translation from source to target language. In this paper, we propose an approach based on word embeddings, a method that captures contextual clues for a particular word in the source language and gives those words as translations that occur in a similar context in the target language. Once we obtain the word embeddings of the source and target language pairs, we learn a projection from source to target word embeddings, making use of a dictionary with word translation pairs.We then propose various methods of query translation and aggregation. The advantage of this approach is that it does not require the corpora to be aligned (which is difficult to obtain for resource-scarce languages), a dictionary with word translation pairs is enough to train the word vectors for translation. We experiment with Forum for Information Retrieval and Evaluation (FIRE) 2008 and 2012 datasets for Hindi to English CLIR. The proposed word embedding based approach outperforms the basic dictionary based approach by 70% and when the word embeddings are combined with the dictionary, the hybrid approach beats the baseline dictionary based method by 77%. It outperforms the English monolingual baseline by 15%, when combined with the translations obtained from Google Translate and Dictionary.

This paper presents Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Mumbai's (CDACM) submission to the NLP Tools Contest on Part-Of-Speech (POS) Tagging For Code-mixed Indian Social Media Text (POSCMISMT) 2015 (collocated with ICON 2015). We submitted results for Hindi (hi), Bengali (bn), and Telugu (te) languages mixed with English (en). In this paper, we have described our approaches to the POS tagging techniques, we exploited for this task. Machine learning has been used to POS tag the mixed language text. For POS tagging, distributed representations of words in vector space (word2vec) for feature extraction and Log-linear models have been tried. We report our work on all three languages hi, bn, and te mixed with en.

In this work, we describe a conditional random fields (CRF) based system for Part-Of- Speech (POS) tagging of code-mixed Indian social media text as part of our participation in the tool contest on POS tagging for codemixed Indian social media text, held in conjunction with the 2016 International Conference on Natural Language Processing, IIT(BHU), India. We participated only in constrained mode contest for all three language pairs, Bengali-English, Hindi-English and Telegu-English. Our system achieves the overall average F1 score of 79.99, which is the highest overall average F1 score among all 16 systems participated in constrained mode contest.

Building Part-of-Speech (POS) taggers for code-mixed Indian languages is a particularly challenging problem in computational linguistics due to a dearth of accurately annotated training corpora. ICON, as part of its NLP tools contest has organized this challenge as a shared task for the second consecutive year to improve the state-of-the-art. This paper describes the POS tagger built at Surukam to predict the coarse-grained and fine-grained POS tags for three language pairs - Bengali-English, Telugu-English and Hindi-English, with the text spanning three popular social media platforms - Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. We employed Conditional Random Fields as the sequence tagging algorithm and used a library called sklearn-crfsuite - a thin wrapper around CRFsuite for training our model. Among the features we used include - character n-grams, language information and patterns for emoji, number, punctuation and web-address. Our submissions in the constrained environment,i.e., without making any use of monolingual POS taggers or the like, obtained an overall average F1-score of 76.45%, which is comparable to the 2015 winning score of 76.79%.

Machine dialect interpretation assumes a real part in encouraging man-machine correspondence and in addition men-men correspondence in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Machine Translation (MT) alludes to utilizing machine to change one dialect to an alternate. Statistical Machine Translation is a type of MT consisting of Language Model (LM), Translation Model (TM) and decoder. In this paper, Bengali to Assamese Statistical Machine Translation Model has been created by utilizing Moses. Other translation tools like IRSTLM for Language Model and GIZA-PP-V1.0.7 for Translation model are utilized within this framework which is accessible in Linux situations. The purpose of the LM is to encourage fluent output and the purpose of TM is to encourage similarity between input and output, the decoder increases the probability of translated text in target language. A parallel corpus of 17100 sentences in Bengali and Assamese has been utilized for preparing within this framework. Measurable MT procedures have not so far been generally investigated for Indian dialects. It might be intriguing to discover to what degree these models can help the immense continuous MT deliberations in the nation.

Appropriate feature set for representation of pattern classes is one of the most important aspects of handwritten character recognition. The effectiveness of features depends on the discriminating power of the features chosen to represent patterns of different classes. However, discriminatory features are not easily measurable. Investigative experimentation is necessary for identifying discriminatory features. In the present work we have identified a new variation of feature set which significantly outperforms on handwritten Bangla alphabet from the previously used feature set. 132 number of features in all viz. modified shadow features, octant and centroid features, distance based features, quad tree based longest run features are used here. Using this feature set the recognition performance increases sharply from the 75.05% observed in our previous work [7], to 85.40% on 50 character classes with MLP based classifier on the same dataset.

Use of the extended definition of heat dQ=deQ+diQ converts the Clausius inequality dS greater than or equal to deQ/T0 into an equality dS=dQ/T involving the nonequilibrium temperature T of the system having the conventional interpretation that heat flows from hot to cold. The equality is applied to the exact quantum evolution of a 1-dimensional ideal gas free expansion. In a first ever calculation of its kind in an expansion which retains the memory of initial state, we determine the nonequilibrium temperature T and pressure P, which are then compared with the ratio P/T obtained by an independent method to show the consistency of the nonequilibrium formulation. We find that the quantum evolution by itself cannot eliminate the memory effect.cannot eliminate the memory effect; hence, it cannot thermalize the system.