IIT Kharagpur, 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 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.

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."