LTRC: Celebrating 25 Years in Language Research
Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) was established in October 1999 in response to the preeminent scientific challenge of our time – enabling machines to read, understand and derive meaning from human languages especially in the Indian context and Indian languages. It was, perhaps, first such a research theme focused centre in the country and today LTRC is the largest academic centre of speech and language technology in South Asia.
LTRC at IIITH, founded 25 years ago, has become one of India’s leading institutions in Language Technology research.
Initially focused on areas like Machine Translation, Semantic Parsing, and Information Extraction, the centre has expanded its research portfolio to include Speech Recognition, Text Generation, Sentiment Analysis, Dialogue Systems, and more. Over the years, LTRC has built a thriving ecosystem of researchers, students, and collaborators who have carried forward the centre’s pioneering work in various directions, many of which had their origins at LTRC itself.
Today, the centre embodies the spirit of IIITH’s logo — a mighty banyan tree — with its deep roots in research and far-reaching impact.
LTRC offers a range of academic programmes in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL), from undergraduate to doctoral levels. Its B.Tech. courses prepare students for engineering careers, while the Dual Degree and MS by Research programmes focus on nurturing future researchers.
PhD Scholars
Masters degrees
Dual degrees
B.Tech
Being an applied centre, right from the start, LTRC focused on translating research ideas into systems, tools, and resources, and strove to make them publicly available whenever possible. A lot of this has been possible through work that has come out of major funded projects undertaken over the years. The stakeholders have been varied: from government and defence organizations to industry partners as well as academic partners.
Topic: Language technologies for social good
Topic: Past perfect, Future tense
Future directions for NLP at industrial scale
It’s a few words restricted to 160 characters, but the reach and impact of a single tweet goes way beyond. With 313 million monthly active users, and 1 billion unique monthly visits to sites with embedded tweets in over 40 languages, its influence is phenomenal to say the least.
Read moreIn 2017, Harper Collins named fake news as the “word of the year” beating other short-listed words, equally influenced by Politics. Not only was this term consistently in the news, it seemed to be the most favoured word appearing on President Donald Trump’s Twitter handle.
Read moreWhen 23-year-old Kelsey Ball came to Hyderabad as a Teaching Assistant last Summer, she knew it wasn’t going to be her last time. The Teaching Assistantship was part of a study abroad programme that brought students from the University of Texas at Austin to IIT Hyderabad.
Read moreIt’s said that ‘Google before you Tweet’ is the new ‘Think Before You Speak’. Living and breathing this very adage are today’s millennials. Hence the runaway success and the response generated by a recent poster presentation on campus about ‘Privacy and Security in Online Social Media’ comes as no surprise. Let’s see what the buzz was about.
Read moreOn the heels of the recently concluded 11th Humour Research Conference, we find out just why humour research is not a laughing matter at the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC).
Read moreIIITH is poised to disrupt Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in India by building a six language multi-lingual system by August 2021. Prof. Anil Kumar Vuppala from IIITH’s Speech Processing Lab helps deconstruct this emerging industry.
Read moreProf. Scharf is an expert on Paninian grammar, and, thanks to his tireless efforts, it is now easy for researchers to have access to original Sanskrit manuscripts, texts, and lexical resources online.
Read moreThey say a workspace says a lot about one’s personality. Going by that, it’s a no-brainer to find a nature lover, a patron of handicrafts, a wanderluster and an immensely hospitable person in Prof. Dipti Misra Sharma, head of the Language Technologies Research Centre.
Read moreRadhika Mamidi, faculty at the Language Technologies Research Centre, IIIT-H, doesn’t just believe in the cliche, “stop and smell the roses’; she actually lives it. Her photographs of little known natural wonders on campus often prompt other faculty and students to take another dekko of the same beaten path.
Read moreIIITH’s Language Technologies Research Center (LTRC) has been exploring exciting possibilities in the emergent multi-lingual speech recognition domain. We caught up with Prof. Anil Kumar Vuppala, a central figure in speech technology to hear it.
Read moreProf. Aditi Mukherjee, a sociolinguist, is teaching Linguistics to IT students about how language works. After a long career in pure humanities, she has reinvented herself and now takes a course in computational linguistics at IIITH’s LTRC lab. Here’s the story.
Read moreFrom the ability to curate electives across disciplines to participating in research at the undergrad level, from the freedom on campus sans curfews, to being responsible for one’s own actions, IIITH’s culture owes its genesis to one of its founding fathers – Prof. Rajeev Sangal. As he prepares for his second innings, we look back at this avant-garde multi-hyphenate who embodies the phrase ‘simple living and high thinking’.
Read moreChiranjeevi Yarra’s research in Spoken English and Indian language forensics and informatics could help millions in Rural India to speak English better, by understanding phonemes and accents in their local language and dialect, for a more productive ML-based user experience.
Read more“I loved to play video games as a child. And I thought I would eventually build one. That was my main motivation to study Computer Science,” grins Arushi Dogra. Hailing from Pathankot, Arushi says she first learned of IIIT-H from her brother’s friend.
Read moreIIITH-ians have learned not to bat an eyelid at the sight of Vinay Singh scorching the campus roads at 12 in the night. For this 24-year-old captain of the football club, it is a way of unwinding. In a free-wheeling conversation he tells us how sports is therapeutic and hopes physical activity is given a priority in higher educational institutions.
Read moreWhen Sriram Venkatapathy originally came to IIIT-H for a BTech degree in 1999, little did he know that he would call the campus his home for 10 years. An acclaimed researcher with over 8 patents to his name, Sriram is now a Senior Scientist with the Alexa Machine Learning group at Amazon. Read on to find out his views on research and why he highly recommends pursuing a PhD.
Read moreTale of two sisters: The 12 km ride from home seemed too short for 16-year-old Khyathi, who quivered with anxiety as her parents drove her to IIITH’s gates.
Read moreOttawa-based IIITH Alumnus Sowmya Vajjala, a published author shares her secret on juggling a full-time career at the National Research Council of Canada, along with parenting, blogging and churning out bi-lingual literature in Telugu and English. Here’s how she does it.
Read moreWho amongst us is not guilty of doing a quick internet search in the midst of an argument to prove a point? Or which millennial parent has not resorted to the Internet to answer their child’s queries? Simplistically put, such a process through which relevant answers are fetched for us is essentially known as Information Retrieval (IR). There have been many rapid advancements in the field of information retrieval and its applications can be found across diverse fields.
Read moreThe graduating batch of 2018 BTech students is gearing up for their convocation this weekend. And all of them are doing the happy dance. While some of them have decided to further their interests towards higher education in research, the rest have all gotten comfortably placed in reputed firms. Of these industry-bound students, 16 have been picked up by international firms. We talked to a bunch of these graduating 20-somethings for whom Europe beckons. Let’s see where exactly they are headed, what it takes and what makes them tick.
Read moreMounika Kamsali Veera’s award-winning poster showed how deep neural networks can automatically identify the language from a short duration of speech signal uttered by an unknown speaker.
Read moreEvery year, the Peter Drucker Society Europe unveils a unique essay contest inviting original ideas and thoughts from students and young professionals from all over the world: The Drucker Challenge. With this year’s theme, “How to stay human in a robot society”, the challenge invited opinions on how Peter Drucker would react if he met his android twin today and if Drucker’s human-centered approach would be of any help in maintaining the face of society in the context of AI.
Read moreIn conversation with Sreekavitha Parupalli, an MS by Research graduate from the Centre for Exact Humanities who speaks of her research work inspired by the vision of the Late. Prof. Navjyoti Singh and how it has enabled her to contribute to her own community.
Read moreA business incubator typically helps fledgling startups grow and develop their business. But here’s the story of how the first startup that germinated on IIIT-H campus laid the foundation for CIE, the startup incubator. In conversation with Prof. Vasudeva Varma, Dean (R&D) and CEO of IIIT-H Foundation, who on the occasion of IIIT-H’s 20th anniversary and CIE’s 10th talks of this faculty-backed, very first of many startups that quietly hummed into existence.
Read moreTo make its products more relevant to Indians, Google is working on a host of initiatives especially customized for its Indian audiences. From working with Indian language publishers, to bringing more relevant content online, to launching a new feature in Google Go that lets you listen to web pages, these products show it has Indian users in mind.
Read moreAs the largest academic centre of speech and language technology in South Asia, the Language Technology Research Centre at IIIT-H carries out pioneering work in the areas of natural language processing, computational linguistics, speech processing, information retrieval through four specialized labs, whose works complement each other.
Read moreResearchers from the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC), IIITH make a first-of-its-kind attempt at semantic role labelling of Hindi-English code mixed tweets. This was presented at the Linguistic Annotation Workshop during ACL 2019, Italy.
Read moreAccording to the Artificial Intelligence for Speech Recognition Market in India 2019 report, more than 50% of the Indian population use devices that are embedded with AI-based speech recognition technology. However, in a multilingual country like ours with 22 official languages and 12 different scripts, these voice-enabled devices are dominated by English-speaking assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant among others.
Read more“Practical Natural Language Processing”, a book co-authored by IIITians, has caught the eye of the global AI community, snagging a place in the top 1% of all general and technical books sold on Amazon. Anuj Gupta, Harshit Surana and Sowmya Vajjala shared the backstory on how their book was published by industry giant O’Reilly Media, a rare feat for an all-Indian team of writers.
Read moreMS by Research students at IIITH, Bipasha Sen and Aditya Agarwal have earned bragging rights with their admission into the coveted Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program at MIT. They give a detailed account of what it takes.
Read moreThe Indian contingent is back from the International Linguistics Olympiad 2023 with an individual silver medal and three honourable mentions. Year after year, IIITH plays a significant role – from organising the national selection program in partnership with Microsoft Research India to mentoring the Indian team for the international finale.
Read moreEven as the celebrations over Team India’s medals haul at the International Linguistics Olympiad 2024 are yet to die down, we take a look at the path to the finale that unfolds for the Indian contingent.
Read moreAccording to data obtained from WHO, “more than 1 in 4 people will develop a mental health issue at some point in their lives”. The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (GBD 2010), estimated that a substantial proportion of the world’s disease burden came from mental, neurological and substance use disorders.
Read moreFor all ye fence-sitters who are debating the merits or otherwise of the Dual Degree programme, before you head to online forums in search of answers, find out what it takes. Straight from the horse’s mouth. In conversation with B.Tech, MS by Research student Dhruv Khattar.
Read moreIndustry is constantly on the lookout for state-of-the-art innovative technologies that can provide that edge to its product or service. While premier academic institutions typically churn out newer research in their labs, they often miss the exact focus required by industry.
Read moreNLP researchers at IIITH join hands with social scientists in first-of-its-kind multi-disciplinary project that seeks to build a digital mentor shielding adolescent girls from online toxicity while promoting their emotional well being.
Read moreAt the risk of sounding self-disparaging, we nevertheless begin meetings with the scientific research community by asking them to “dumb down” their research for us. What we essentially mean is of course to explain it such that a layperson with little or no exposure to the Sciences (much less machine learning or deep learning) can get a sense of it.
Read moreFrom visiting the Chowmahalla Palace and the Charminar to walking alongside the Hussain Sagar, from eating Hyderabadi biryani to craving for the deep-fried potato served for Friday lunches at the mess, from riding the Metro to taking the ubiquitous Uber, from dabbling in tennis on campus to checking out Cult.
Read moreSince January 2020, every weekend a motley crowd makes its way to the Nilgiri building at IIIT-H in search of the T3 lab. They are students, homemakers, retired professionals, journalists and school teachers. There’s even a scientist from BARC and a retired superintendent of Police in the mix. These men and women hailing from various parts of Hyderabad and Secunderabad are unified in the pursuit of contributing content to Wikipedia – in Telugu. Read on to know how IIIT-H is facilitating this movement.
Read moreFrom helping with homework assignments to recipe recommendations based on leftovers to penning love letters for Valentine’s Day, it seems there’s very little that OpenAI’s popular bot ChatGPT can’t do. As part of the Silver Jubilee edition of the R&D Showcase 2023 hosted by IIITH, a roundtable was conducted amongst faculty to mull and brainstorm over the future of academics and research in the times of ChatGPT.
Read moreStudents from JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur, look back at their a-MAY-zing experience even as they bring their semester at IIITH to a close.
Read moreWhen IIIT Hyderabad launched SPEC, an alternative admission channel for meritorious, rural and economically disadvantaged students, little did they realize that down the line, they would be celebrating sweet success, with Harshavardhan Thatipamula snagging the Best all-rounder award for 2024. Here’s his story.
Read moreWinner of the Bhashini Grand Innovation Challenge by MeitY, Govt. of India, eBhasha Setu is taking ‘knowledge for all’ very seriously with its language processing technology services.
Read moreIndia may well have 22 scheduled languages but the fact remains that English continues to be the number one aspirational language. Scientists at IIITH unveil a tool that may help aspirants in their quest for proficiency in the spoken tongue.
Read more