Google into Indian language CLIR

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/businessline/blnus/15181205.htm

Google mulls Indian version of cross-language info retrieval

MUMBAI: Internet giant Google may come up with Indian version of its cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) facility, which searches queries in English pages and gives result in native language.

“We introduced this facility in 15 international languages in May and it has been extremely popular. Looking at its success, there is a possibility that Google may introduce the same in any of the Indian languages, depending upon its usage,” Mr P Nayak, Member, Technical Staff, Google, told PTI here on Tuesday. Though he declined to confirm the language, he said it could possibly be Hindi or Tamil since they were two widely used languages in India.

“The English web-based search engines have very large and good content available. But there are also smaller language web pages like Arabic and Chinese, where search doesn’t give enough information compared to English. CLIR, through its in-built translat ion facility, expands the scope of search.”

CLIR is a subfield tool dealing with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user’s query. For example, a user may pose query in English but retrieve relevant documents written in French. “To avail this facility, the user has to log on to www.translate.google.com, type the query in English and seek the information in any of the 15 languages including English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic,” he said. – PTI

IL Input interfaces

The comments at the bottom of this artcile point to  some other works on Indian language input tools.

http://www.contentsutra.com/entry/rediff-acquires-minority-stake-in-bangalore-software-startup-tachyon-techno/

The Inner game of Innovation

These are some random thoughts as I am preparing for a talk on Innovation that I am supposed to give in CA. This talk got postponed to some time in January but I am unable to stop thinking about it – So, would like to share with you some of these things:

•   As I am looking at Innovation, there are three categories of them that come to my mind:Innovation is synonymous with start-ups – there is lot of excitement new ideas and zeal to transform these ideas to real, robust, scalable and useful products. Norm Meyrowitz of NKM Advisors and formally CEO/Chairman of Macromedia gave a great talk about looking at these innovations and asking twenty questions to validate your ideas, products, future prospects and health of your start-up. If you want to watch this you can contact me or Prasad.

• Innovation that happens at Great Companies: Geoffrey Moore is a best-selling author (Crossing the Chasm, Dealing with Darwin), …, Managing Director at TCG Advisors and a venture partner at MDV talks in his Darwin book about how great companies keep innovating at various stages of their existence. He talks about product/service/application innovation, process innovation and operational innovation besides popularly known disruptive innovation. This is a great resource.

• Academic Innovation: This is where we have a lot of scope for putting our thoughts together and creating ideas, methods and material that can be used by others. In one sense SIEL is a good example of academic innovation.

1. Choosing problems that are relevant now, and continue to be relevant for at-least next 3-5 years and are challenging from research point of view.

2. Creating complimentary skills, groups, owners, partners, strategy for growth and success

3. Continue to dream BIG and infect others with this virus.

Of-course there is a lot of scope for improvement and we need every one to start thinking towards the great difference we can make as a team and the way we can change the information is accessed by every one on the planet.

More when we meet later

Introduction

Welcome aboard, comrades!

This is the group-blog of Search and Information Extraction Lab, aka SIEL. SIEL is a part of Language Technologies Research Center (LTRC) at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), India. Our aim to share our thoughts and ideas on the work we do and to keep ourselves abreast about the events happening in the field of Information Retrieval. We write here on the recent developments in the field that we came to know, what we are doing now and ofcourse, the funnier part of our lives too. After all, what is life without fun?

Please do read through, drop in your comments and suggestions here. We will keep ourselves updated regularly. Keep visiting.