Though the vague ideas had been with me for many years, I started to formally work on (what I have named) Computational Modeling of Scripts (CMS). Incidentally, modelling is wrong in 2007, modeling was wrong in 1907, but it is not really a case of language variation. Anyway, two of my papers (co-authored with Harshit Surana) related to the work on CMS were accepted and I had to present both of them in March. I wouldn’t give here the details about the work on CMS because if I begin, there would be no end.
The first paper was titled ‘Using a Model of Scripts for Shallow Morphological Analysis Given an Unannotated Corpus’ and I had to present it at a Workshop on Morpho-Syntactic Analysis. It was being held at Bangkok as part of the 2nd School of Asian NLP for Linguistic Diversity and Language Resource Development. In this case, the long name of the event was justified by the fact it went on for ten days. But even though I had to attend a lot of talks everyday, I didn’t mind. I missed the first two days because of the highly efficient way in which our bureaucracy works. I actually had to go back from the airport after checking in with luggage and all. I managed to survive the nightmare and, thankfully, my nine days at Bangkok were among the best I have had for years, in spite of many problems: food, language, money etc. This was the first time I had gone to any place east of Varanasi and, to put it simply, I liked it.
