Union communication and IT minister, A Raja yesterday launched the Indian language technology proliferation and deployment Centre (ILTC-DC) at the meeting of re-constituted national e-governance advisory group meeting in New Delhi. The ILTP-DC portal (http://www.tdil-dc.in) was also launched during the event.

Speaking on the launch, Raja said that the ILTP-DC would open the doors to a new phase in language technology development where the general public will not only be the primary beneficiaries, but they would play an important role in driving the focus of the research initiatives. Such public participation will encourage and enhance the viability of language technologies and their absorption among the masses, the minister added. The ILTP-DC will also offer a forum for researchers and members of the general public to converge on a common platform to fill the gaps that researchers need to address.

Minister of state for communication and IT , Sachin Pilot, said that Language computing can reach its zenith only when it surpasses cross cultural barriers and ensures its proliferation in each and every home. The efforts in this direction have shown promising results and ILTP-DC will further strengthen the initiatives, he observed. The multi-language translation services will certainly be a boon for literature lovers who can access the rich literature of our country, which have been hitherto only available in their respective local language said the Minister of State.

The ILTP-DC has been developed under the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) Programme of the Department of Information Technology (DIT), the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MC&IT) in association with premier partnering institutes such as IITs , IIITs, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) etc.

The primary objective of the ILTP-DC is to promote the usage of Indian languages across multiple verticals, and boost R&D in language technology by providing potential researchers with the necessary tools and resources. Under this mandate, the ILTP-DC will offer a host of services to users through its portal such as English to Indian Languages Machine Translation (8 Language Pairs), Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation (18 Language Pairs), as well as linguistic resources and tools for research purpose.

The ILTP-DC will act as a repository for all the excellent research work carried out by premier research institutions in India. This will go a long way towards ensuring that language technology tools as well as advanced natural language processing technologies will be easily available to members of the general public and the research community.