Development of Linguistic Resources and Tools for Providing Multilingual Solutions in Indian Languages - A Report on National Initiative

The multilingual diversity of India is one of the most unique in world. Currently there are 22 constitutionally recognized languages with 12 scripts. Apart from these, there are at least 35 different languages and 2000 dialects in 4 major language families. It is thus evident that, development and proliferation of software solutions in the Indic multilingual environment requires continuous and sustained effort to edge out challenges in all core areas namely storage and encoding, input mechanism, browser support and data exchange. Linguistic Resources and Tools are the key building blocks to develop multilingual solutions. In this paper, we shall present an overview of the major national initiative in India for the development and standardization of Linguistic Resources and Tools for developing and deployment of multilingual ICT solutions in India. The initiative of Language Technology Development in India broadly categorized in three phases namely (i) Early Initiative-Seeding Effort, (ii) Consolidation Phase and collaborative development phase towards development of futuristic technology and associated phases. The National Initiatives in each phase of development and major achievement especially with respect to standardization of language resources and tools towards development of integrated language technology solutions are also highlighted in this paper.