A three-day national seminar on 'Creation of Lexical Resources for Indian Language Computing and Processing' was held at C-DAC Mumbai, Juhu centre from 26th to 28th March 2007. It was jointly organized by the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT), New Delhi , MHRD, Govt. of India and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Mumbai, DIT, MC&IT, Govt. of India.    

After the mellifluous recitation of a vandanaa for goddess Sarasvati, the seminar was inaugurated by lighting the traditional lamp. Prof. K. Bijay Kumar, Chairman, CSTT New Delhi, Mr. Zia Saquib, Executive Director, C-DAC Mumbai, Mr. Madhukar Sinha, Director (ICR) HRD Ministry, Prof. N. Rajasekharan Nair, Professor of Linguistics, Annamalai University, Mr. Deepak Kumar, Scientific Officer, CSTT, Mr. R. S. Rawat, Deputy Director Implementation, Home Ministery, Prof. R. K. Joshi, Visiting Design Specialist, C-DAC Mumbai, Dr. Alka Irani, Sr. Research Scientist & Head LCG, C-DAC Mumbai graced the occasion of lighting .

Mr. Zia Saquib pronounced a hearty welcome address to all the delegates and audience; afterwards, briefly introduced C-DAC Mumbai's leading role in R&D initiatives related to software technology, and in particular, Indian language computing. There was an invited talk by Mr. Madhukar Sinha on copyright issues with specific reference to software and lexical resources. Prof. K. Bijay Kumar delivered a very informative and lively talk on 'Principles of Evolving Technical Terminology'. Prof. N. Rajasekharan Nair, in his keynote speech,gave a comprehensive account of the lexical resource building activities within india as well as abroad.  

The seminar received a warm response from across the country. More than 80 scholars participated in the event. Delegates from IIT Bombay, University of Mumbai , IIIT Hyderabad, C-DAC Kolkata, University of Hyderabad , Microsoft Research , Bangalore, Thapar University Patiala, University of Punjab Patiala , JNU New Delhi, Annamalai University Tamilnadu, Punjabi University Patiala, Pondicherry University , Banaras Hindu University Varanasi, University of Kerala , Aligarh Muslim University , Kendriya Hindi Sansthan Agra, Indlinux, Sarai New Delhi, etc. presented their research papers. Some of the delegates delivered talks on their hands-on experience also. Attendees from C-DAC Pune, Red Hat Software services Pune, etc took active part in the discussions.  

There were ten technical sessions in total spread over three days. Following papers were presented in the seminar:  

• Collection, Development and Publication of Linguistic Resources Issues and Experiences with Indian Languages: Baskaran Sankaran & A. Kumaran 
• Speech Corpora Development in Indian Languages: Shyamal Kr. Das Mandal & Arup Saha.  
• Problems of Urdu-Hindi Automatic Transliteration: Dr. Sabahuddin Ahmad & Dr. Abdul Aziz Khan  
• Statistical Analyses of and English-Myanmar Text Corpora: Hla Hla Htay, G. Bharadwaja Kumar, and Dr. Kavi Narayana Murthy  
• Lexicography in Hindi: Challenges and Opportunities in the 21^st century: Dr. Abhishek Avtans  
• Art of Hindi Dictionary Making: An Historical Exploration: Ravikant Sharma  
• The Structure of a Dialect Dictionary of Agricultural Vocabulary in Tamil: Dr. S. Raja  
• Lexicographic Traditions in India and Sanskrit: Dr. Malhar Kulkarni  
• Issues in Developing Corpus for Malayalam from Web as Source: Dr. S. A. Shanavas  
• Study of Cognates Among South Asian Languages for the Purpose of Building Lexical Resources: Anil Kumar Singh & Harshit Surana  
• Rule-based Machine Translation System using Indian Logic for Discourse Texts: Kommaluri Vijayanand  
• A Frame Work for Designing Punjabi Deconverter & Case Markers for Punjabi Language Server: Parteek Bhatia  
• On Developing Lexical Resources (with Special Reference to LRs Developed at IIIT(H)): Prof. Thakur Dass  
• Creation of Lexical Resources for Machine Translation: Dr. Rajendra Kumar Gupta  
• Causative Compound Verb Constructions: A Generative Lexicon Account: Dr. Sanjukta Ghosh and Dr. Anil Thakur  
• Handling Polysemous Particles in Multilingual Environment: Dr. Anil Thakur and Dr. Sanjukta Ghosh  
• Prosodic Elements in Composite Argumentative Connectors of Marathi: Ms. Ujjwala Joglekar 
• Evolving Translations & Terminology - the Open Source Way: G Karunakar & Ravishankar Shrivastava  
• Bricks and Mortar for Digital Resources in Indian Languages: Gora Mohanty  
• Design and development of Punjabi Spell Checker: Prof. G. S. Lehal  
• Corpus Based Statistical Approach for Stemming Telugu: M. Santhosh Kumar & Kavi Narayana Murthy  
• Morphological Analyzer for Great Andamanese Verbs: Implementing a Concatenative Template: Narayan Kumar Choudhary, Anvita Abbi, and Girish Nath Jha  
• Problems in Developing Lexical Resources for Computing: Rita Mathur  
• Multilingual Wordnet Creation with Focus on Indian Languages: Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya & the Wordnet Group
• Education in Mother Tongue for the Tribals – Need of Common Lexical Resource Database and inguistic Harmony of Indian Languages: Subodh Hansda  
• Named Entity Recognition for Telugu: P Srikanth, Kavi Narayana Murthy  
• Automatic Construction of Telugu Thesaurus from Available Lexical Resources: M.Santhosh Kumar, Kavi Narayana Murthy

Some exquisite posters on the significance of 'shabda or word' (designed by Prof. R. K. Joshi and his supportive team) enhanced the aesthetic beauty of the event. Mr. Deepak Kumar, convener of LRIL-2007 expressed his thanks and appreciation to all the delegates and urged them to be involved and cooperative in CSTT's future activities.     

The final day was graced by our special guest Mr. Som Dutt Dadheech, HOD, Human Centered Computing Division, TDIL, DIT, MCIT, Govt. of India, who extended his full support for such activities in future. The seminar concluded with a panel discussion and valediction. "Transforming into a Developed Nation with a Language of Her Own" was the topic of discussion. Dr. Dharmendra Kumar, CSTT chaired the discussion and the panel included Dr. Malhar Kulkarni, IIT Bombay, Dr. Abhishek Avtans, Kendriya Hindi Sansthan Agra, Mr. G. Karunakar, IndLinux, Mr. Anant Joshi, L&T Infotech, Mr. N R Bheda, Human Settelments Environment & Youth Centre, Prof. R.K. Joshi, C-DAC Mumbai, and Prof. Lion Luthriya, media personality. At the end everybody felt that it was not, in fact, the end of the event but the true beginning of further events. It was decided that further communications will be made via e-mail.Dr. Alka Irani finally thanked and expressed her deep sense of gratitude to all for making the event successful.