In 1996, Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya, with the support of the United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan, embarked on a pioneering effort to revolutionize multilingual information exchange and advance Natural Language Processing (NLP) research in India. This journey began as part of the Universal Networking Language (UNL) project, a global initiative that brought together 15 research groups across continents to enable seamless communication across languages.

Building on this momentum, the Computation for Indian Language Technology (CFILT) Lab was officially established in 2000 at IIT Bombay’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, with a generous grant from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), Government of India. From its inception, CFILT set out to break linguistic barriers, pioneering research in machine translation, linguistic resources, and AI-driven language technologies, with a strong emphasis on Indian languages.

Over the past 25 years, CFILT has evolved into a powerhouse of innovation, consistently pushing the boundaries of computational linguistics. The lab has led groundbreaking research, developed transformational linguistic resources, and fostered deep industry collaborations. CFILT has collaborated with various industries (IBM Research, Flipkart, Meta, etc.) and government organizations (MEITY, CRIS, DRDO, DST, etc.). With a legacy of impactful contributions and an unwavering commitment to excellence, CFILT continues to shape the future of language technology, expanding the horizons of NLP and empowering languages through cutting-edge AI.