MSR India Summer School on Natural Language Processing

Microsoft Research India, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, will conduct the Microsoft Research India Summer School on Natural Language Processing. The school will be held from May 3- May 18, 2007 at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

The summer school will consist of lectures by leading experts in the fields of Natural Language Processing from around the world. The aim of the school is to introduce students and young researchers to important new areas and latest results in NLP in a consolidated and comprehensive manner. The school aims to bring the state of the art in research in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics to senior undergraduate students, graduate students, research scholars and faculty members, and to provide a forum for Indian and international researchers to interact.

The participants are expected to have reasonable exposure to the fundamental ideas and methodologies in these areas to derive maximum benefit from the lectures. The lectures are designed to offer self-contained introductions to chosen topics, leading up to some open problems for research. The guest lectures (May 7-18, 2007) may be preceded by some preparatory talks (May 3-5, 2007). We wish to emphasize here that this is not a lecture series covering the syllabus of any university course on Natural Language Processing- the objective of the summer school is to bring to the participants the latest research results in the area.

We hope to scribe these lectures, edit these notes and produce a volume that would be made available along with some web materials. The participants may be expected to write surveys/ tutorials/ web materials or interact with speakers on various research problems of mutual interest. MSR India will support travel and board for a few faculty members and for about 50 to 60 students.

Program Committee

Prof Pushpak Bhattacharyya, IIT Bombay
Dr A Kumaran, MSR India
Prof K R Ramakrishnan, IISc
Prof Sudeshna Sarkar, IIT Kharagpur
Prof Vasudeva Varma, IIIT Hyderabad

Lecturers and lecture topics

The lectures for the MSR India Summer School on Natural Language Programming are as follow. Please note that this is subject to change.

Morphology Lab in NLP Summer School 2007

The morphology lab was motivated for the twin reasons of morphological complexity of Indian languages and lack of resources in many of these languages. The lab aimed at i) exposing the students to the issues in Indian language morphology and providing hands-on experience in building tools for morphology and ii) building some tools for resource poor Indian languages. The lab focused on three resource poor languages (Kannada, Malayalam and Punjabi) apart from Hindi, which was included as majority of the participants knew Hindi. Two tools were considered viz. Morphological analyzer and unsupervised learning of morphology and totally the lab had 10 projects in various combinations of these four languages and two tools.

Click here to know more about the Morphological Analyzer Lab.

Venue

The Summer School will be conducted in collaboration with IISc, in Super Computer Education and Research facilities of IISc. The accompanying lab on Morphology would be held in the computing lab of Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) of IISc. Stay arrangements have been made in the IISc campus and the guest houses of CPRI (adjacent campus).

Summer School Blog

Get in touch with your colleagues (fellow SummerSchool participants) here. Click here to go to the blog - http://summerschoolonnlp2007.spaces.live.com/.

School Photo