VRCLC is a research and the project lab of IIITM-K to promote and strengthen local language with the support of Information Technology.    The VRCLC web portal will act as the repository of various information about the research and projects related to language computing and the software tools, standards to enable localization in a computer.  The work mainly concentrates to Malayalam Language, that can address the linguistic barrier of our people using the computer and also to enable the usage of various e-Governance projects to common man

Virtual Resource Centre for Language Computing (VRCLC) is established at  IIITM-K  to promote language computing research and development to bridge the digital divide and leverage the power of Information Technology. A country like India, which values its culture, heritage and language, is greatly in need of local language computing so as to combat the dominance of English in computing and also to reach out to information access in local languages at everybody’s doorstep.

India has had about 25 years of history in language computing (LC) which has gone through its ups and down.  But during the last decade there has been a paradigm shift with a significant leap to LC as a new computing arena.  The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY), India initiated Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) with the objective of developing Information Processing Tools and Techniques to facilitate human-machine interaction without language barrier; creating and accessing multilingual knowledge resources; and integrating them to develop innovative user products and services. 

The major activities of TDIL involves Research and Development of Language Technology,  which includes machine translation, multi-lingual parallel corpora, cross lingual information access, optical character recognition and text to speech conversion,  proliferation of language technology and  development of standards related to Language Technology etc.  Various projects and research have been undergoing under TDIL with the effort of number of Scientific organizations and Educational Institutions.  The projects are in consortium mode and IIITM-K is one of the  consortium members of two prestigious projects Indian Language Corpora Initiative (JNU ILCI) and Indian Language Machine Translation System (IIIT-H ILMT).

VRCLC aims to promote Malayalam Computing and Language Computing by conducting  research and developments in this area mainly in Machine Translation Systems, Corpora developments, tools and Interfaces, Standards and tackling various issues pertaining to Malayalam language when it’s translated.   The centre will also promote Malayalam Computing initiatives  in the  state to setting up standards, creating awareness, providing training and consultancy and development of  Localization tools. In order to fulfill the mission  to make Kerala the First E-literate state in India, a collaborate and joint efforts in the development of tools, software and interfaces are  highly required.   The success of  an e-Governance project depends  only when it reaches to the common people and only when it can be accessed in local languages.     So there is a big need for Malayalam Computing solutions that can benefit to a large community of Malayalam Speaking.

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