Convergences03- International Conference on Convergence of Knowledge,
Culture, Language and Information Technologies- was held in the heritage
site of "Bibliotecha Alexandrina", the library of Alexandria, on December
2-7, 2003. The objective of the conference- as described by Prof.
T. Della Senta, the conference co-chair and president of the UNDL
foundation Geneva, on the opening day of the conference- was to bring
together researchers and the professionals from IT and CS, linguistics,
sociology and other areas of intellectual pursuits.
The keynote address of the conference was delivered by Prof. M.G.K.
Menon who touched upon a range of broad issues emphasising the need
for convergence of disciplines in today's world of decreasing space
and knowledge boundaries. He mentioned two events- the World Summit
on Information Societies (WSIS) and the Research Summit on Information
Societies (RSIS) to be held in Geneva mid December, 2003- where deliberations
will be held on the issue of due credit being assigned to research
on fundamental science. It is this kind of research that has made
it possible for the marvels of technological developments- like the
internet- to come into existence today. Some examples of these are
fibre optics, laser and even transistor.
IIT Bombay had a significant presence in the conference. Four research
papers were presented on the topics of (i) multilingual,meaning based
search (ii) automatic generation of multilingual lexicons from source
texts (iii) improvement in case retrieval through sematics and (iv)
analysis and generation of Bengali to and from the Universal Networking
Language (UNL) representation of text. The first presentation was
accompanied by a demonstration of the system. This system was to be
presented in WSIS too.
A session of the conference was devoted to the topic of "semantic
web and large scale knowledge management". Dr. Hiroshi Uchida of the
UNDL Foundation mentioned that a project was underway to encode the
encyclopedia in UNL. This will enable accessing these knowledge sources
in multiple languages of the world through the process of generation.
Leading industries from Japan were participating in this endeavour.
Dr. Hasida of Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Tokyo
described a software for large scale knowledge management which will
be released next month. Some interesting presentations were as follows.
Prof. Palmira Marrafa of the University of Lisbon discussed how the
effectiveness of wordnets will enhance manifolds through the introduction
of predicate and telic links. Dr. Mathieu Lafourcade of the Laboratory
of Informatics and Robotics, University of Montpellier, described
an algorithm for choosing with high probabiliy the correct Universal
Words (UW) and the UNL relations while constructing UNL graphs. Prof.
Igor Boguslavsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences presented and
demnostrated an editor that would help create semi automatically the
UNL graphs. Dr. Ronaldo Martins of the University of Brasilia had
a presentation dealing with the question of how to represent concepts
that have "shades", e.g., colour which is a spectrum. Prof. Jesus
Cardenosa of the University de Polytechnica, Madrid presentated their
work on the standardization of the generation process in a multilingual
environment. Ms Kelly Hutchinson- a researcher from the Royal Melbourne
Institute of Technology and working in Kambodia- presented a paper
on accessible information and communication systems and local knowledge
to facilitate knowledge sharing between the organizations from developed
and developing countries. The XMLification of UNL docuements was presented
by Prof. Christian Boitet of GETA-CLIPS, Grenoble, France.
The language research centers across the world using UNL had a meeting
chaired by Prof. Della Senta. It was mentioned that UNESCO heritage
websites will be converted to UNL representation and deconverted into
muliple languages. UNESCO is very interested in funding such multilingual,
multicultural endeavours. It was also suggested in the meeting that
the technical committee and the validation committee dealing with
the specification and management of UNL systems be revived. It may
be mentioned here that IIT Bombay was a member of the international
technical committee of the UNL, functioning from 1998 to 2001 and
helping create the specification document of UNL.
Half a day of the conference was devoted to a tour of the "Bibliotecha
Alexandrina", the heritage library of Alexandria. The present library
is 200 mts to the east of the site of the ancient library which was
burnt twice- in 47 BC when Julius Ceasar attaked Egypt and in 391
AD. The present library is constructed in seven steps- the lowest
dealing with phillosophy and ethics- the foundations- and the uppermost
dealing with information technology- the future. The library has a
collection of 250,000 books and also an internet library containing
100 terrabytes of webpages.
The last day of the conference had a presentation from the Bibliotecha
on their ongoing projects. Dr. Noah Adley- the IT director of the
library- mentioned the participation of the library in the "Digital
Library of the world" project initiated by the Carnegie Melon University
and participated in by 28 institutes of India and 17 institutes of
China. The concluding presentation was given by Dr. Ismail Sergeldin,
director bibliotecha Alexandrina and ex-vice president of the world
bank. He mentioned that about a week back the eminent literateuer
Umberto Eco said in a talk delivered in the library that machine translation
was an impossibility. Dr. Sergeldin said he he did not agree with
Mr. Eco and discussed at length why MT is not only possible but a
must for the future. He also stressed the importance of preservation
of cultural and language diversities in the face of the onslaught
of the internet.
The conference concluded with a vote of thanks by Prof. Della Senta
who mentioned that a book will be brought out with a selection of
10 best papers presented in the conference.
The author of this writeup also spent a day in the University of Cairo
(Al-Qahira University) some of whose departments are 600-700 years
old. The Al-Azzar mosque associated with the university has existed
since the 11th century AD and is devoted to Islamic studies, where
students come from all over the world. The engineering program of
the university prides itself on leather and adhesives technologies
and architecture. Predictably, Egyptology is a program of international
repute for the university.