Coimbatore: Tamil pedagogy should undergo a change in accordance with advancements in information technology, said experts at the 17th World Tamil Internet Conference held at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) here on Friday. They also urged students to take up college projects in Tamil computing, as this could make available resources such as machine translation software better.
The three-day conference, which began on Friday, is organised by International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT) along with TNAU. It would focus on developing software and applications for efficient Tamil computing and innovating Tamil pedagogy.
Pointing out that around 5,000-6,000 project theses were being done at technical institutions and universities across the state annually, M Anandakrishnan, former vice-chancellor of Anna University, said, “Tamil computing will improve drastically if at least 10% of these projects focus the same.”
While students have been apprehensive about doing college projects in Tamil computing, he said he had known instances where companies have recruited students who had undertaken projects in Tamil computing just because they had chosen an unexplored field.
According to him, children should be made familiar with Tamil computing at school level. “Today, using Tamil fonts is easy as an enormous amount of Tamil fonts are available online for free. Also, availability of Tamil software must be made inexpensive,” he said.
Appasamy Murugaiyan, chair of INFITT, said though the conference’s main subject was knowledge-based search engines in Tamil, it would also focus on other topics such as Tamil pedagogy using technology, linguistic research using technology and machine translations. “There are several online platforms that offer translation services today, but they can be made better. We will also share our expertise with them in this area.”
Vice-chancellor of TNAU K Ramasamy, meanwhile, recalled the role played by engineers for the growth of Tamil in recent times. “Three engineers – V S Kulandaisamy, M Anandakrishnan and M Ponnavaikko – started Tamil computing. While Periyar reformed Tamil letters, Kulandaisamy made advancements in Tamil keyboard. While Tamil teachers help the language grow, these engineers have rejuvenated it,” he said.
The conference has three sections - main arena, public arena and an exhibition space. Experts from India and abroad would present papers on subjects ranging from computer-aided teaching of Tamil, Tamil computing tools and natural language processing.