Hyderabad: A researcher at the IIIT-H has developed the largest computational version of the Telugu dictionary. The researcher, Ms Sreekavitha Parupalli, at 21, is one of the youngest to receive her Master’s degree this year. She manually annotated 8,483 verbs, 253 adverbs and 1,673 adjectives from a Telugu-Telugu dictionary. She completed the task of typing out about 21,000 Telugu words along with their meanings from a dictionary with the help of her mother Vijaya Lakshmi. Ms Parupalli then built a database of Telugu words including their usage as verbs, adverbs and adjectives.
A product engineer at Sprinklr, Ms Parupalli submitted her thesis when she was 20. Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, she said, “Even though Telugu WordNet exists, there are a few issues that researchers face while using it and it has limited coverage. Most researchers prefer working on existing resources to enrich the systems rather than creating one from scratch.”
“Very few from our campus seem to work on Telugu language”, Ms Parupalli said.“Native speakers can perform better annotation tasks as both the word and its meaning are in a language they are familiar with. Any computer science expert or researcher can design algorithms that can work on top of the annotated language data. My research work has added numerous words to the existing resources ” she said.
