New Delhi: Indian Institute of Technology, IIT Guwahati is developing a project ‘Speech Technologies for North Eastern Languages’ to develop speech technology tools for healthcare information dissemination.
The speech technology tool developed by IIT Guwahati will allow for the retrieval of healthcare related information with the help of spoken keyword spotting (KWS) in seven North East Indian languages
A database of health-related information in seven languages spoken in North East India will also be created as a part of the project, which is expected to facilitate the access to healthcare-related information by the people residing in the far-flung areas of North East India in their own native languages.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, under its ‘National Language Translation Mission (NLTM): BHASHINI’ initiative, has funded this project of the Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology (CLST), IIT Guwahati.
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Professor T.G. Sitharam, Director, IIT Guwahati, pointed out the unique aspects of the project, saying that it embodies the institute's commitment to work for the local languages and ethnicities of North East India. The interdisciplinary nature of the project and the focus on local languages will reflect the spirit envisaged in the National Education Policy, NEP 2020.
The project involves building speech technology tools for healthcare information dissemination in various languages including Hindi, English, Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Manipuri, Khasi, Mizo, Nagamese, and Nepali.
Speaking about the project, Professor. Rohit Sinha, Principal Investigator of the project, and Head, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, IIT Guwahati, said that the Institute is dedicated to developing tools to facilitate last-mile connectivity and information dissemination to the various communities living in the North Eastern area, in their own languages. The project will be a step towards achieving that aim.
Further, he said that the Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology (CLST) was a unique and truly interdisciplinary centre, devoted to the analysis and technology development in the languages of North East India, through research projects and its PhD programme.
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The Spoken Keyword Spotting (KWS) systems developed in the project will enable the users to detect a list of predefined words in a given speech signal of one of the target languages of the project.
The efforts will involve modeling speech with deep neural network-based state-of-the-art techniques.
The interdisciplinary team of the CLST team comprises Prof. Rohit Sinha, Prof. Priyankoo Sarmah, Sanasam Ranbir Singh and Ashish Anand from CLST, IIT Guwahati.
The project is part of a larger consortium project titled Speech Technologies for Indian Languages, headed by IIT Madras as the consortium leader.
The IIT Guwahati team will collaborate and work together with research teams from CDAC-Kolkata, IIIT Sri City, and NIT Manipur, for the North East project.
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