IndicNLP - A opensource initiative for NLP on Indigenous languages

[Muru Selvakumar]

Language is not a bunch of words strung together that we exchange in order to get our needs met. It is not just a medium for communication. It is the medium of the mind. It shapes how we think. It is what helped us out smart other animals, by carrying knowledge of medicine, astronomy and etc over to us from the past. It is also the realm, where poetry lives. It is the time capsule of our history. It is where our ancestors are still alive. It is what comes close to what we might call heaven.

Using our mother tongue in day to day life will keep it alive. But is that enough? No. We want the indigenous language not just to survive but thrive. Technology has become an essential part of our day to day life. We need to be able to read, write and converse with computers in our mother tongue. That is where AI comes in.

We believe Artificial Intelligence will play a key role in shaping our future as a whole.

We need to train the machines to understand our language and that is where we need your help. We need your help to teach AI your language. AI can already understand many languages like English and French, because there are huge corpora from which the AI can learn. Indigenous languages do not have that. Join us in our quest to make machines learn what it means be unified under rich diversity.