The Ministry of Electronics and IT has appointed Prof Pushpak Bhattacharyya from IIT Bombay as the chairman of the National Committee on Indian Language Standards.
This committee will evaluate encoding, fonts, search performance, and language technology applications for all 23 official languages of India. The committee’s mandate will last for one year.
In an exclusive interview with AIM, Bhattacharyya said that he has been working on the emotional and sentimental problems in NLP since his master’s at IIT Kanpur, and has published over 350 papers. “What got me interested in linguistics, emotions, and AI was the similarities between the words of different languages and their respective sounds,” he said.
Bhattacharyya said that he is also working on Plutchik’s wheel of emotions with eight emotions at Centre for Indian Language Technology (CFILT) lab at IIT Bombay, which is a subsequent work of his recent paper, ‘Zero-shot multitask intent and emotion prediction from multimodal data’.
This problem deals with combining different types of emotions within one context, a foundational problem that he said no one has taken up before. “At our CFILT lab, we take up problems that no one else has before, which includes not just Indian languages,” he added.
Bhattacharyya emphasised on building a trinity model for creating Indic language models, which means deciding one language, one task, and one domain for creating models. “For example, creating a model in Konkani for question answers on agriculture or a sentiment analysis system for railway reservation in Manipuri,” he explained, saying that these models are easier to build and then can be connected later into a larger model.
Starting his BTech at IIT Kharagpur studying digital electronics, Bhattacharyya came across a circuit board made for adding two numbers. Unlike others who did not think of it much, he was astounded at how a lifeless system made of diodes and resistors had decision-making capabilities. This got him into studying intelligence outside bodies of human beings and animals, leading him to AI.
“I’m one of the few NLP researchers who give equal importance to linguistics and computation,” he beamed. He added that his course is inspired by both the fields and how his master’s thesis was also focused on Sanskrit to Hindi machine translation.
