Presidential award for contributions to Malayalam

 Posted on August 16, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Happy to share the news that I am awarded by President of India for contributions to Malayalam language. Maharshi Badrayan Vyas Samman by the Hon. President of India is in recognition of my contributions in the field of Malayalam language. The award, instituted in 2016, is given to the substantial contributions to languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabi, Pali and Classical Oriya, Classical Kannada, Classical Telugu, and Classical Malayalam. This is given to young scholars in the age group of 30 to 45 years. [Read More]
award 

Root Zone Label generation rules for Malayalam released

 Posted on July 13, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

On July 10,2019 ICANN released Label generation rules for eight scripts Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam. Oriya, Tamil, Telugu. These rules are criteria for determining valid Domain Names for the Root Zone of the Domain Name System (DNS). The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit organization which takes care of the whole internet domain name system and registration process. Internationalized Top Level Domain Names are domain names not limited to English. [Read More]
icann  idn 

Markov chain for Malayalam

 Posted on June 8, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I have been trying to generate a Markov chain for Malayalam content. A Markov chain is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event.(wikipedia). For natural language, it represents a probabilistic model of words- the probability that one word can come after another word. This model can be prepared by feeding large amount of text to system that learns the probabilities of each words. [Read More]
markov 

Chilanka version 1.400 released

 Posted on June 5, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A new version of Chilanka typeface is available now. Version 1.400 is available for download from SMC’s font download and preview site smc.org.in/fonts For users, there is not much changes, but the source and code build system got a major upgrade. Source code updated to UFO format from fontforge sfd format. This allows to work with modern font editors. Use cubic beziers for master design, generate OTF along with TTF. The original drawings for Chilanka was using cubic beziers. [Read More]
fonts 

Lexicon Curation for Mlmorph

 Posted on May 26, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

One of the key components of Mlmorph is its lexicon. The lexicon contains the root words categorized as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc. These are the components used with morphological rules to generate the vocabulary of Malayalam. I collected initial lexicon with about 100,000 words from various sources such as Wikipedia, CLDR and many targeted web crawls. One problem with such collected words is they often contains spelling mistakes. Secondly, classifying these words is not possible without the tedious task of a person going through each and every words. [Read More]
mlmorph 

LibreOffice Malayalam spellchecker using mlmorph

 Posted on March 10, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A few months back, I wrote about the spellchecker based on Malayalam morphology analyser. I was also trying to intergrate that spellchecker with LibreOffice. It is not yet ready for any serious usage, but if you are curious and would like to help me in its further development, please read on. Malayalam spellchecker – a morphology analyser based approach Blog post on spellchecker approach and pla Current status The libreoffice spellchecker for Malayalam is available at https://gitlab. [Read More]
libreoffice  mlmorph  spell checker 

Malayalam Named Entity Recognition using morphology analyser

 Posted on March 10, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Named Entity Recognition, a task of identifying and classifying real world objects such as persons, places, organizations from a given text is a well known NLP problem. For Malayalam, there were several research papers published on this topic, but none are functional or reproducible research. The morphological characteristics of Malayalam has been always a challenge to solve this problem. When the named entities appear in an inflected or agglutinated complex word, the first step is to analyse such words and arrive at the root words. [Read More]
mlmorph  morphology  named entity recognition 

Scribus gets hyphenation support for 11 Indian languages

 Posted on March 2, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Support for hyphenating in 11 Indian languages is now available in Scribus, desktop publishing system. Two years back I had written how Malayalam hyphenation support was added to Scribus. Later, I had filed a bug to add support for more Indian languages. That is now fixed. Scribus has a new way to download and use these hyphenation dictionaries. You can now use this feature right away in your installed scribus. The languages with hyphenation support are the following: [Read More]
hyphenation  scribus 

Gayathri – New Malayalam typeface

 Posted on February 21, 2019  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing is proud to announce Gayathri – a new typeface for Malayalam. Gayathri is designed by Binoy Dominic, opentype engineering by Kavya Manohar and project coordination by Santhosh Thottingal. This typeface was financially supported by Kerala Bhasha Institute, a Kerala government agency under cultural department. This is the first time SMC work with Kerala Government to produce a new Malayalam typeface. Gayathri is a display typeface, available in Regular, Bold, Thin style variants. [Read More]
fonts  gayathri  Malayalam  unicode