Apoorva's story so far...

Less than 2 weeks ago, I was just another VTU student in my final year B.E who had got placed in an IT company and who wanted to be done with college and join work. A job in hand, a project in a company and I thought my life was set until I met my project mentor Sudarshan Iyengar from CSA dept IISc. He once discussed with me of the importance of the final year project in my career and the value of doing it in a research institute such as IISc. I found ample amount of time to consolidate and make the right decision. But to be honest, formulating a team to work on this project was not an easy task. But once the team was confirmed, there was no looking back.

 We had our first project meeting at IISc in a restaurant called "Nesara" (don't miss to have 'Bonda Soup' there ;-)) where we were briefed about the project and the meetings henceforth. I have never felt more interested in a project or an idea before. Though the first two weeks passed by familiarizing with the tools required for the project, it has almost been 7 hours a day of work. Oh! no....not complaining. It is always nice to learn something new. Few days are very productive while few other days turn out to be discouraging without any progress. But it is all part of a project. We started off with learning the basics of Python programming language. With this comes a lot of packages and APIs which eases your job (as Sir calls it -"The magic wands") . One of the most indispensable tools which we learnt was WordNet which is a package available in NLTK. Bhuvan was assigned the task of learning the basics of WordNet and teaching us some of it. It was hilarious when Bhuvan was giving us some examples in class and it used to return ridiculous synonyms and we all used to burst out laughing. He is the most enthusiastic in the team(only boy too ;-)), so it is quite obvious as to who gets ragged daily in class. We are doing a lot of literature survey, learning a lot of English grammar in the process. Anusha was so keen on teaching all of us about Subversion that she caught hold of Bhuvan when she realized none of us were listening to her. This is a funny picture that I captured on that day. I remember Bhuvan shouting out to her- "aye! bitbide nannana please" :D

             But Anusha did not let him go so easily. She managed to make him sit and listen to her entire explanation. ;-)

  We usually meet at 7.30 in the morning at DSCE and start off the day with discussions and to-do list for the day. Since most of us Indians are very punctual (count me first!), we decided that one should treat the teammates for lunch, should he come late to class that day. And if I may recall an incident, we were treated with delicious lunch by our Sir the very next day ;-). Let me get a little technical and tell you what our project is all about.

 Text Simplification is a self-explanatory phrase which means simplifying the text. The definition would change only with the target users. But the real question to ask would be: How do you simplify the text? Well, there has been remarkable development in this field over the last decade. Countries like UK,US and Japan have developed systems which simplifies text for people with cognitive disabilities and which performs text-to-speech translation. If you can notice something here, these are nothing but NLP tasks. There are very simple ways to do it, one of them being replacement of complicated words with simpler synonyms. But one must understand the complexities behind such a process. You may end up paraphrasing few sentences which will not fit into the flow of the text. This is widely known as the discourse  problem. There has been a lot of research going on in this field and we hope to contribute for the same in our own creative way.

         It feels good to know that you are contributing to the society in some way and doing your duty as an Engineer, which I am sure I wouldn't have gained much by buying a project from outside.

          I not only get a chance to do a nice project here but it comes with some added benefits:

1. If we come out with a nice paper, we can publish it in an International Conference.

2. I would add value to my profile in case I decide to apply to any university for my higher education. (selfish motive!)

    

                With such great tools like Internet and facilities provided to us students, I am confident that each one of us could develop a very nice project in the given time.

Finally, this post would be incomplete if I didn't mention my teammates who are immensely talented. With Ambika's intelligence and dedication, Bhuvan's enthusiasm and programming skills, Anusha's determination and attitude, I don't see any reason why our project wouldn't be an extraordinary success!

Cheers :-)