SMC/SoC/2008
SMC in Google Summer of Code 2007
Santhosh Thottingal will be lead admin this year, and will deal with the administrative stuff with Google for SMC to be a mentoring organisation
Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2008
Tokenizer/Lemmatiser for malayalam for GATE
Write a Lemmatiser for Malayalam. See whether we can do a plugin for GATE for malayalam, that would help NLP reasearchers a lot and that would be a great idea. Google search GATE,download and install GATE , and in the plugins directory a hindi tokenizer and lemmatiser is available.
Functional Optical character Recognition system
Add malayalam Support for tesseract OCR.
- Study tesseract OCR system
- Recogntion of all characters
- Layout recogization using ocropus (optional ?)
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/
Write a Gnome Speech Driver for Dhvani and Integrate it with Orca
- Orca for visually impaired users uses gnome speech for speech engines. Currently Festival, Espeak, freetts etc have drivers for gnome speech. We need to write a driver for dhvani.
- Develop plugins for KTTS/Gedit/Firefox
Write a Dhvani Interface for Speech Dispatcher
The goal of Speech Dispatcher project is to provide a high-level device independent layer for speech synthesis through a simple, stable and well documented interface. Since SD is more discussed to act as a unified TTS layer for both gnome and KDE, We can try to write a Interface for that
Rewrite the Dhvani sound system with SDL and Additional APIs
- Rewrite the ALSA sound system of Dhvani with SDL to make it a cross platform application
- Packaging for different platforms
- Bug fixes for langauge modules and Code clean up
- Adding pitch/volume/pause support for the generated speech
- API to stop the speech in between a synthesis
- Provide Dhvani as a library
- API to check whether the synthesizer is producing speech(isSpeaking)
Localization of Free Content Management Systems to Malayalam-Drupal &Joomla
100% localization of Drupal and Joomla CMS systems to Malayalam
Speech recognition system for Malayalam
The aim is to develop a speech recognition system for Malayalam using the concepts of memory prediction framework. Meory prediction framework put forward by Jeff Hawkins in his book 'On Intelligence'(2004) is a theory of brain function, based on the hierarchical organization of human neocortex.It explains how this hierarchical structure enables brain to match sensory inputs to the stored memory patterns for predicting the future input sequences. According to this model, neocortex as a layered structure with different layers storing constructs of varying complexity, with sensory inputs coming to the lowest layer. For example in case of vision, the lower layer receives retinal signals and layers up the hierarchy associates themselves with meaningful constructs like lines, two dimensional figures, and furthur up specific objects like faces etc. In speech the layers store different speech constructs from phonemes and syllables to phrases and sentences. The human speech perception and recognition can be understood using this hierarchical organization and the ability of brain to predict the future inputs. If we mimic the way in which human brain recognizes speech, the resulting system will be more robust than existing systems. The system is first trained with a carefully compiled database and different speech constructs are stored in different layers.When a speech segment to be recognized is given, a series of predictions start and signals will be passed upwards and downwards the layers, until the most probable speech construct is arrived at. For example if the most probable candidate for first word is 'how', predictions start as to what succeeding words can be. This continues until the last word and the phrase giving maximum most probability will chosen among these predictions.
References:
- "On Intelligence", Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee; Henry Holt, 2004
- "Hierarchical Temporal Memory - Concepts, Theory, and Terminology" by Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George, Numenta Inc.
- http://www.phillylac.org/prediction
Creating a new family of Equal Height Fonts (EHF)for Malayalam language
To design and create a new family of Equal Height Fonts for the traditional Malayalam script. Following Roman typology, serif and sans serif type of font variations are available in Malayalam. Equal Width Fonts, such as Courier, available in Roman typography are impossible for Malayalam characters and this is unnecessary. The proposed Equal Height Fonts is a new concept in the history of font making to surmount the typographical challenge of vertically stacked conjuncts.