NCCPB-2005 hopes to standardise Bangla

From left Abul Ahsan, vice president, IUB Prof. M Asaduzzaman, chairman, University Grants Commission, Prof. Bazlul Mobin Chowdhury, vice chancellor, IUB, and Prof. Mohammed Anwer, director, school of engineering and computer science, IUB are seen at NCCPB-2005

Dr. M. Lutfar Rahman, professor of computer science and engineering, Dhaka University chaired the event, while chief guest, Prof. M Asaduzzaman, chairman, University Grants Commission, special guest, Prof. Bazlul Mobin Chowdhury, vice chancellor, IUB, guest of honour, Abul Ahsan, vice president, IUB and Prof. Mohammed Anwer, director, school of engineering and computer science, IUB graced the occasion.

"Computer has become an essential part of our lives but we seem reluctant to bring into use our own language. The introduction of Bangla will help native speakers to become computer literate," said Prof. M Asaduzzaman.

Many research papers were submitted in this field from academic and research institutions in Bangladesh, India and other institutions abroad. After careful scrutiny 36 papers and two keynotes are selected for the conference and are published in the conference proceedings," said Dr. Rahman.

Prof. Abdus Sobhan, of the applied physics and electronics department, University of Rajshahi, presented one keynote paper that discussed the policies and technological issues on computer processing of Bangla.

He said: "Among policy issues, standardization and adoption of the standard Bangla keyboard preceded others."

Other issues were creating a website for CPB and maintaining it with documents and related abstracts, funding for R & D and organising workshops.

"In course of time compatible software in Bangla speech to text would be developed," said Prof. Sobhan. "Bangladesh is closely associated with a few regional forums and translation software would definitely have a good impact on the countries' trading and other agreements across the border," he added.

The second keynote paper described a complete script of conjunct-free structure of Bangla letters Nobobangla -- developed by Shah M.Musa, a scientist at Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA.

The purpose defined for this conversion of habitual Bangla characters to Nobobangla is that conjunct characters generate a large number of symbols, making it difficult for a user to learn and use them effectively.

Scholars and experts say that there are over 900 conjuncts in Bangla. With the invention of Nobobangla, its interface with the computer can be directly based on ASCII keyboard.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange where the keyboard layout is presented sequentially like the English alphabetical order and Nobobangla characters will follow suit.

The Nobobangla script has only 47 symbols compared to more than 900 in Bangla making it easier to learn and use. The phonetic analyses have been considered for pronunciation of Bangla words using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. Nobobangla has reduced the vowels in Bangla from 11 to just seven vowel characters.

The changes hopefully will bring a new dimension in the field of Bangla computing.