Projects

I am excited to announce that the Malayalam morphology analyzer library, mlmorph, is now available as a Rust crate on crates.io. This Rust binding became possible thanks to the availability of Rust bindings for mlmorph’s underlying library - the Stuttgart Finite State Transducer (SFST) formalism. You can find the SFST Rust crate here. The crate comes with comprehensive documentation and example usage to help you get started with Malayalam morphological analysis in your Rust projects.

While working with MetaPost for typeface design(Nupuram, Malini), I frequently felt the need for a quick and easy way to test code snippets. This mirrors the functionality of popular online sandboxes like CodeSandbox or JSBin, which many developers are already familiar with. These platforms provide a web-based environment where you can edit code, see the output instantly, and avoid the hassle of setting up a complete application or environment. Inspired by this concept, I’ve been developing a MetaPost sandbox, and I’m excited to share it with you in this blog post. ...

ഏറെക്കാലമായി പലരും ചോദിക്കുന്ന ഒരു സംശയമാണ് അക്കങ്ങളുടെ കൂടെ ആം ചിഹ്നം എഴുതുമ്പോൾ വരുന്ന കുത്തുവട്ടം എങ്ങനെ കളയാമെന്ന്. 16-ാം, 18ാം തുടങ്ങിയ ഉദാഹരണങ്ങൾ. ഒട്ടുമിക്ക അപ്ലിക്കേഷനുകളുടെ പുതിയ പതിപ്പുകളിലും ഈ പ്രശ്നം കാണില്ല. ലിബ്രെഓഫീസിൽ പക്ഷേ ഈ പ്രശ്നം തുടരുന്നുണ്ട്. ഇതിനു പരിഹാരമായി ഫോണ്ടുകളിൽ ഒരു ചെറിയ പുതുക്കൽ നടത്തിയിട്ടുണ്ട്. മഞ്ജരി, ഗായത്രി, ചിലങ്ക, നൂപുരം ഫോണ്ടുകളുടെ പുതിയ പതിപ്പുപയോഗിച്ചാൽ ഈ പ്രശ്നം ഒഴിവാകും. പുതിയ പതിപ്പുകൾ smc.org.in/fonts എന്ന പേജിൽ നിന്നെടുക്കാം.

I attended Wikimania 2023, an annual conference of people working on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This year’s conference was at Singapore. State of Machine Learning on the Wikimedia projects I presented a talk titled “State of Machine Learning on the Wikimedia projects”. Machine learning is used in many Wikimedia projects. This talk was be round up of various projects that use ML. I talked about: How Machine learning is used in our project, the benefits and impact. How we make sure the usage is as per the ML usage policies? The design, ethics and product considerations of ML in our projects. What are the challenges we are facing and how we are solving them? Potential opportunities that are worth exploring Following is the video recording from the session. Link to presentation slides ...

Sentence segmentation is a fundamental process in natural language processing. It involves breaking down a given text into individual sentences, a task that finds applications in various contexts. Whether you need to split a paragraph into sentences for further analysis or present sentence boundaries in a user-friendly frontend application, sentence segmentation is crucial. At first glance, identifying sentence boundaries might seem straightforward – just look for a period or full stop. However, it quickly becomes complex when you consider cases where a period is used for abbreviations such as “Dr.” or in numerical values like “3.14.” This simple punctuation mark doesn’t always signal the end of a sentence. ...

A new version of Malayalam spell checker based on mlmorph is available as python library. Install the library $ pip install mlmorph_spellchecker Sample usage >>> from mlmorph_spellchecker import SpellChecker >>> spellchecker = SpellChecker() >>> word = "ഉച്ഛാരണം" >>> spellchecker.spellcheck(word) False >>> spellchecker.candidates(word) ['ഉച്ചാരണം'] >>> spellchecker.spellcheck("ചിത്രകാരൻ") True The new version adds a database of commonly mistaken words of Malayalam for quick checks and correction. If the given word is present in that common list, spellcheck result and correction suggestions will be based on that database. This database is based on Malayalam Wikipedia’s commonly mistaken words and Kerala government glossary of such words. Source code is at gitlab ...

A new version of Manjari typeface is available now. New version adds about 25 Latin glyphs that are considered important by Google Fonts checks. Manjari is now integrated with Fontbakery font quality check in its CI. Some bugs reported by Fontbakery is also fixed. It is available at SMC website. Change log is available in gitlab SMC also started to publish the font releases in a new release file server - releases.smc.org.in. Thanks to Balasankar and Ashik for the release workflow automation.

A rough drawing I did in 2014 November 20 and shared with my friends as a new font idea. I got this concept from my explorations about perfect curves in Malayalam script after I released Chilanka font. I spent all my free time from then onwards till releasing Manjari typeface on 23rd July 2016 by making it as perfect as I can. I took two months time off from my job in 2016 to complete this work too. Kavya also helped me in preparing the thin variant from outlines. Once released, it became one of the most popular typefaces in Malayalam. ...

A new version of Manjari typeface is available now. It adds Vedic Anuswara letter ഄ - 0D04 encoded in Unicode 13.0 It is available at SMC website. To learn more about Vedic Anuswara, you may refer the encoding proposal

I prepared a web frontend for the Malayalam spellchecker based on the Malayalam morphology analyser. It is available at https://morph.smc.org.in/spellcheck.html. I had written an article about its technology two years ago. There s also an incomplete extension to LibreOffice. The spellchecker is available as an API too. If you want to use it, please refer a minimal code snippet available at codepen. The quality of spellcheck and suggestions provided depend on the completeness of mlmorph project. Since mlmorph is ongoing and highly complex project, this will take time.