State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Junaid Ahmed Palak said the artificial intelligence services on language and technology would change the country's IT infrastructure. Mentioning that 40 services and tools related to language and technology are being developed under the ICT department, he said that by 2021, 40 services will come online. At the same time, services like text to speech, spelling and grammar correction and OCR will be added to convert e-document to D-document.
The state minister made the remarks while interacting with officials on the progress of various projects under the BCC of the ICT department, including the Bangla language enrichment project in information technology through research and development, on Monday.
Mentioning that ‘Bangla Board’ is being developed like Gboard, Palak said that this input system or keyboard will have spell checker, OCR and speech to text engine. This input system has features like automatic next character and next word suggestion, he said.
The state minister said information technology would be made accessible to persons with disabilities through screen readers, braille converters and sign-to-text recognition systems. A layout free keyboard called Universal Board is also being developed to bring minority language languages under information technology. Digital resource archives are also being created to preserve the languages of minorities.
Palak said work is underway to build a 100 million syntactic tree bank corpus, which is part of the National Corpus. The first Corpus Driven Lexicon in Bangladesh is being made from this component. The program also includes a ten-hour speech corpus. He said that social network opinion mining is being done through sentiment and emotion analyzer.
It is also reported that tools like crowdsource applications, NLP pipelines and scrapers are being developed with indigenous technology. He also said that work is underway to create a mechanical translator service in 10 languages from Bengali. The state minister hoped that these artificial intelligence services would revolutionize the country's information technology sector by 2021.
NM Ziaul Alam, Senior Secretary, Department of Information and Communication Technology, Parthapratim Dev, Executive Director, Bangladesh Computer Council and other officials were present on the occasion.