Invitation to SEALANG-L

Doug Cooper (doug@nwg.nectec.or.th)
Wed, 14 May 1997 12:09:27 +0700

Invitation to join the Southeast Asian Languages List, SEALANG-L

SEALANG-L is a non-moderated mailing list devoted to scholarly discussion
relevant to Southeast Asian languages.

While much past discussion has focused on 'traditional' linguistics, I am
strongly encouraging participation from computational linguists and computer
scientists. Research across the board has suffered greatly from a lack of
instrumentation (on the linguistics side), analysis (on the software side),
and machine-usable data (on both sides). Existing software/algorithms for
both roman-alphabet and Far Eastern languages have not supplied satisfactory
solutions.

Computing in the region presents fascinating problems. For example, the
central SEA languages Thai/Lao, Burmese, and Khmer are of different families,
and have related, but mutually unintelligible writing systems. But challenges
they pose for software development are essentialy identical -- the myriad
complications that arise from very long alphabets, written without spaces
between words, on many vertical levels, and read in context-dependent order.

Open questions involve text segmentation, optical character recognition,
information retrieval, text-to-speech, transcription systems, parallel text
alignment, translation assistants, phonetic lookup, and so on. These find
immediate application in lexicography, etymology, phonology, and all corpus-
based linguistics research.

For more information, please visit the SEALANG Web site, or subscribe at
the address given below.

sealang-l@nectec.or.th Address to post messages to.
majordomo@nectec.or.th To subscribe to SEALANG.
http://seasrc.th.net/sealang SEALANG-L Web site.
doug@nwg.nectec.or.th List owner (with Trin Tantsetthi
trin@inet.co.th)

Looking forward to hearing from you on SEALANG-L,
Doug Cooper
Southeast Asian Software Research Center, Bangkok
doug@nwg.nectec.or.th http://seasrc.th.net
_________________________________________________

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