PAN Localization at The School for Asian Applied Natural Language Processing

   

Overview

Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory of NICT Asia Research Center, NECTEC, Asian Language Resource Network of NUT and SIIT collaborated in organizing a series of applied NLP lectures for enlarging the NLP expert community from August 21st - September 1st, 2006 . The series of lectures covered the broad range of NLP research realized in many practical projects. Experts in the successful projects were invited to provide the fundamental

 

theories and their implementations. Many systems and development tools were introduced in hands-on exercises aiming at future adoption of the technologies.

In total there were 26 trainees, from 11 different countries who participated in this training.  12 participants were selected from different PAN Localization country teams including representation from Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan and the regional secretariat.   ADD training provided a unique opportunity to  the project team to share different problems amongst the project team members and localization experts and researchers from other parts of Asia.   Panl10n project team members from Laos and Cambodia shared their experiences on word segmentation and its challenges during this training. While Bhutan team members shared their experiences on Text to Speech Systems. The members of team from Nepal and Pakistan team from the regional secretariat of the PAN Localization project discussed about their experienced issues on Machine Translation.

   

   
Objectives

 

The initiative of the School for Asian Applied NLP was fundamentally aiming at sharing the experiences of the experts in the field of NLP. The activities ranged from technology transferring to sharing the research and language resource development through a series of lectures and hands-on exercises. The focus was primarily training felids comprised of NLP architecture, Text to Speech, Speech to Text, Language Engineering, Machine Translation, Advanced System of NLP, Web Engineering and Machine Learning. Following are the objectives of this training.

  • Build experts in NLP
  • Build a human network of NLP expert for sharing the experience, expertise, and collaboration in studying and applying NLP
  • Support the development of language resources for studying and evaluating the technology
  • Support the development of standards for language resource development
  • Support the research and development of NLP common utilities
  • Support the implementation of the existing NLP utilities
     
   
Proceedings

The training was rigorous and helped the participants acquire knowledge about NLP. According to the feedback of trainees it was a wonderful and unique experience to learn many things in a short period of time.