WORKSHOP REPORT

WORKSHOP ON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Information Technology Manipur
Date: 13 - 15 October, 2017
Time: 09 AM - 05 PM



Indian Institute of Information Technology Manipur organized its first TEQIP-III supported workshop on Natural Language Processing from October 13th to 15th 2017. The program was initiated under the leadership of Prof. Amarendra Kumar Das, Interim Director, and convened by Dr. Navanath Saharia, IIIT Manipur, with a motive of providing the fundamental and application oriented techniques to process natural languages by highlighting issues, open research problems, and solution towards languages of north-eastern India. The participants were undergraduate students (2nd and 3rd year), staffs and faculty members from IIIT Manipur, Post-Doc professionals and PhD students from Manipur University, staff and faculty members from NIT Manipur and IT Professionals from nearby IT fraternity. The event comprised of ‘invited talk’ and ‘hands-on’ sessions, which includes the following topics.
  1. Morphological analysis
  2. Syntactic analysis
  3. Text mining
  4. Language & social media computation
  5. Bio-Inspired language processing & generation
  6. Processing of speech

Day 1

The workshop began with the lecture on Text Mining and Analytics by Dr. Kabita Thaoroijam, IIIT Manipur. It was a brief lecture on data mining that cover algorithms for clustering and classification techniques. Discussion ended with clarifying few queries raised from the participants. After lunch break, Dr. Thoudam Doren Singh, IIIT Manipur, started off with the hands-on session, Morphology and Syntax Analysis. This session focused on the implementation of NLP concepts in python using few built-in libraries of NLTK. Techniques such as stemming, find frequency from corpus and parsing were discussed.

Day 2

The second day was started with a brain-storming session, ideas to develop a domain specific dictionary, which was based on the lectures and hands-on sessions of previous day. The session was lead by Dr. Navanath Saharia. After tea/coffee break, Dr. Sanasam Ranbir Singh, IIT Guwahati introduced the role of NLP in social media and its importance in the current scenario. Prof. P. K. Das, IIT Guwahati came up with a interesting speech processing presentation after the lunch break. With presentation style, videos and sample examples Prof. P. K. Das took all the participants to the inner core of the speech processing. After a tea break, Prof. S . B . Nair, IIT Guwahati began his session on Bio-Inspired NL[Processing/Generation]. It was very interesting and brain-storming lecture, which had more about artificial intelligence, robotics, and symbol grounding. The day ended up with mesmerizing talk about practical implementations of NLP and its amazing outcomes so far and in future.

Day 3

The day started with the continuation lecture of Prof. S . B . Nair, IIT Guwahati about few more ideas and discussions on advanced applications of NLP in AI. Next was the continuation lecture by Prof. P. K. Das, IIT Guwahati about speech processing. This lecture was motivating project ideas in the field of speech processing, which has more scope and benefit in the society. After lunch break, it was Dr. Sanasam Ranbir Singh, IIT Guwahati, who took the lead and moved on to introduce about the classification techniques, clustering, regression methods like decision tree with scikit-learn, K-nearest neighbours, Gaussian method, and entropy-based methods. The best part of the lecture was the discussion about the neural networks and deep learning techniques. The workshop ended with a hands-on session about the implementation of classifiers using python.

Participant list



Programme committee

Advisory Committee


Logistic Committee


Convener

Report prepared by: Haripriya B (haripriya@iiitmanipur.ac.in)