A three-day conference on Tamil language computing and Tamil internet will be held in Singapore by the end of May and international experts have started work on their papers to be presented at the event.
More than 500 delegates are expected to attend the 14th International Conference on Tamil Computing and Tamil Internet (Tamil Internet 2015) scheduled May 30 to June 1, organising committee chairman S Maniam told PTI today.
Government officials, academics and professionals from India, Malaysia, the US, Sri Lanka and Singapore are expected to deliberate on various aspects of internationalising Tamil language computerisation programmes.
Tamil teachers from around the world would also join the conference themed "Natural Language Processing and Mobile Computing".
The Tamil computing development began in 1997 at the National University of Singapore with about 25 academics having brainstormed the importance of computerisation, said Maniam.
The annual conference has since been held in different places in India, the US, Malaysia and Singapore which is organised by the California-registered International Forum of Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT), a non-profit global organisation for the language.
The Tamil language computing began with a standard keyboard of 99 characters and has since progressed to international encoding and uni-code methods.
The experts are now working on translations based on search for English word meaning to that of in Tamil as an online dictionary as well as speech to text.
Maniam stressed the annual conference's importance for the global Tamil community, especially from cultural, social and economic aspects linking South India to Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore.
Tamil is also one of the four official languages in Singapore along with English, Chinese and Malay.
Singapore hosts the INFITT secretariat with the government support.
Singapore will host the annual Tamil Language Festival in April.
The festival aims to encourage the use of Tamil among the
community, and instill pride in Tamil Language and Culture in Singapore, said Singapore's National Heritage Board.
The festival is a month of literary, cultural, social and educational programmes in Singapore, it said.
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