Showing papers by "Manjira Sinha published in 2012"

New Readability Measures for Bangla and Hindi Texts

Abstract: In this paper we present computational models to compute readability of Indian language text documents. We first demonstrate the inadequacy and the consequent inap plicability of some of the popular readability metrics in English to Hindi and Bangla. Next, we present user experiments to identify important structural parameters of Bangla and Hindi that affect readability of texts in these two languages. Accordingly, we propose two different readability models for each Bangla and Hindi. The models are tested against a second round of user studies with completely new set of data. The results validate the propose models. Compar ed to the handful of existing works in Hindi and Bangla text readability, this pap er presents the first ever definitive readability models for these languages incorporating their salient stru ctural features.

VoiceMail architecture in desktop and mobile devices for the Blind people

Abstract: The advancement in computer based accessible systems has opened up many avenues for the visually impaired across a wide majority of the globe. Audio feedback based virtual environment like, the screen readers have helped Blind people to access internet applications immensely. However, a large section of visually impaired people in different countries in particular, the Indian sub-continent could not benefit much from such systems. This was primarily due to the difference in the technology required for Indian languages compared to those corresponding to other popular languages of the world. In this paper, we describe the VoiceMail system architecture that can be used by a Blind person to access e-Mails easily and efficiently. The contribution made by this research has enabled the Blind people to send and receive voice based e-Mail messages in their native language with the help of a computer or a mobile device. Our proposed system GUI has been evaluated against the GUI of a traditional mail server. We found that our proposed architecture performs much better than that of the existing GUIs.

A New Semantic Lexicon and Similarity Measure in Bangla

Abstract: The Mental Lexicon (ML) refers to the organization of lexical entries of a language in the human mind.A clear knowledge of the structure of ML will help us to understand how the human brain processes language. The knowledge of semantic association among the words in ML is essential to many applications. Although, there are works on the representation of lexical entries based on their semantic association in the form of a lexicon in English and other languages, such works of Bangla is in a nascent stage. In this paper, we have proposed a distinct lexical organization based on semantic association between Bangla words which can be accessed efficiently by different applications. We have developed a novel approach of measuring the semantic similarity between words and verified it against user study. Further, a GUI has been designed for easy and efficient access.

Forward Transliteration of Dzongkha Text to Braille

Abstract: In this paper we present an automatic Dzongkha text to Braille forward transliteration system. Dzongkha is the national language of Bhutan. The system is aimed at providing low cost efficient access mechanisms for blind people. It also addresses the problem of scarcity of having automatic Braille transliteration systems in language slime Dzongkha. The present system can be configured to take Dzongkha text document as input and based on some transliteration rules it generates the corresponding Braille output. We further extended the system to support an Audio QWERTY editor which allows a blind person to read and write Dzongkha texts or its equivalent Braille through a computer. The editor also contains Dzongkha voice feedbacks to further ease the use.

Modelling the Organization and Processing of Bangla Polymorphemic Words in the Mental Lexicon: A Computational Approach

Abstract: In this paper we try to present psycholinguistically motivated computational model for the access and representation of Bangla polymorphemic words in the Mental Lexicon. We first conduct a series of masked priming experiment on a set of Bangla polymorphemic words. Our analysis indicates a significant number of words shows morphological decomposition during the processing stage. We further developed a computational model for the processing of Bangla polymorphemic words. The novelty of the new model over the existing ones are, the proposed model not only considers the frequency of the derived word but also considers the role of its constituent stem, suffix and the degree of affixation between the stem and the suffix. We have evaluated the new model with the results obtained from the priming experiment and then compare it with the state of the art. The proposed model has been found to perform better than the existing models.

Automatic Extraction of Compound Verbs from Bangla Corpora

Abstract: In this paper we present a rule-based technique for the automatic extraction of Bangla compound verbs from raw text corpora. In our work we have (a) proposed rules through which a system could automatically identify Bangla CVs from texts. These rules will be established on the basis of syntactic interpretation of sentences, (b) we shall explain problems of CV identification subject to the semantics and pragmatics of Bangla language, (c) finally, we have applied these rules on two different Bangla corpuses to extract CVs. The extracted CVs were manually evaluated by linguistic experts where our system and achieved an accuracy of around 70%.