Crossing the border of Languages in open source

[richakumar]

Hi folks,

I will be chatting with @nickmalhotra, Head of Innovation at Tech Mahindra and creator of the Bharat Markup Language, and @knadh, CTO of Zerodha, and creator of Olam and Alar, open source regional language dictionaries. We will get a chance to hear from them about their efforts that are helping make open source more accessible to the non-English audience in India, something that is critical to advance the ecosystem.

We'll post some useful resources here and would love to help answer any questions.

[nickmalhotra]

Www.Bhaml.org

[knadh]

Thanks @richakumar. Here are the links to the resources mentioned in the talk.

Dictionary websites

• Olam - English-Malayalam, Malayalam-Malayalam
• Alar - Kannada-English

Code

• dictmaker - Tool for building and publishing dictionaries in any language like the above ones.
• ml2en - Algorithm for converting Malayalam to phonetic English (can be ported to other Indic languages).
• mlphone - Algorithm for phonetically hashing Malayalam words (similar to Metaphone). Can be ported to other Indic languages.
• knphone - Algorithm for phonetically hashing Kannada words (similar to Metaphone). Can be ported to other Indic languages.
• ditto - Flutter app framework for building mobile dictionary apps like the Olam, Alar apps.

Open data

• Olam / Datuk Malayalam-Malayalam dictionary corpus - 83,000 Malayalam words and 106,000 definitions.
• Olam / English-Malayalam dictionary corpus - 61,000+ English words and 140,000 Malayalam definitions.
• Alar / V. Krishna Kannada-English dictionary corpus - 150,000+ Kannada words and 240,000 English definitions.

The organisation I mentioned in the talk, the one that played a key role in enabling many Indic language computing technologies is SMC (Swathanthra Malayalam Computing).

[nickmalhotra]

Thanks @richakumar and @knadh . It was a wonderful discussion this morning . Code repository is at nickmalhotra/BHARAT_CODE#3 and the open source can be tried at http://BHaMl.org