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While computing has become almost ubiquitous in the US and Europe, its spread in Asia is more recent. However, despite the fact that Asia is a dense area in terms of linguistic diversity (or perhaps because of it), many Asian languages are very inadequately supported on computers. Even basic NLP tools are not available for these languages. This is a major bottleneck in the development of advanced NLP applications and language resources and it also has a social cost.
NLP/CL based technologies are now becoming important and future intelligent systems will use more of these techniques. Most of NLP/CL tools and technologies are tailored for English or European languages. Recently, there has been a rapid growth of IT industry in many Asian countries and in India in particular. This is now the perfect time to address the problem mentioned above, namely lack of computing support and basic NLP tools for less privileged languages. Only when a basic infrastructure for supporting regional languages becomes available can we hope for a more equitable availability of opportunities made possible by language technology. There have already been attempts in this direction and this workshop will try to take them further, especially in the Asian context.
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