மாதம்: மார்ச் 2018

open-tamil -conference articles (2014, ’16, ’17)

Thanks to our co-authors and open-tamil collaborators [Shrinivasan, Arulalan, Sathia Narayanan, among others], we were able to submit 3 articles to INFITT conferences in 2014, 2016, and 2017 respectively.

This year too with some luck we hope to make it to the TIC 2018. We are in process of drafting another article for upcoming 2018 Tamil Internet Conference in Coimbatore, India, to report additional developments from our team. We will be having a somewhat larger author list to properly acknowledge contributors – old and new.

At this time for our own review, we recollect the prior three research articles published about open-tamil (in chronological order) they are:

  1. “Open-Tamil text processing tools,” (2014) Tamil Internet Conference at Puducherry, India : here (Aug, 2014)
  2. “Developments in Open-Tamil library,” (2016) Tamil Internet Conference at Dindugul, India : here (2016)
  3. “Tamil open-source landscape: opportunities and challenges,” (2017) Tamil Internet Conference, UT-Scarborough, Toronto, Canada : here (June, 2017)

-Muthu,

San José, CA

Open-Tamil v0.7 release

I’m happy to announce Open-Tamil 0.7 release, today 23rd March, 2018. Open-Tamil is distributed under MIT license, and available for Python 2.6, 2.7, 3+ and PyPy platforms, via the Python Package index at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Open-Tamil/0.7

You can install the package via ‘$ pip install –upgrade open-tamil’ command issued in your console.

Following updates are made to the Python package:

  1. Series of command line tools will be installed into your Python (for Windows) or local/bin directory (for Linux) with this release. The command line tools are,

     

1. tamilphonetic – convert EN input to Tamil text

2. tamilwordfilter – filter Tamil input only from all input text data

3. tamilurlfilter – filter Tamil text from the input website data

4. tamiltscii2utf8 – convert encoding from TSCII to UTF-8 for input file

5. tamilwordgrid – generate a crossword from Tamil input text and write to output.html file

6. tamilwordcount – like UNIX wc program but for Tamil

  1. Transliteration package updates: Reverse transliteration functions is added; Univ of Madras scheme support is added.
  2. Tamil package: added text summarizer tool via module ‘tamil.utils.SummaryTool’
  3. Solthiruthi package updates: To do spell checking reasonable times and ability to identify and correct many classes of errors are added.
  4. Bug fixes for issues in get_letters(), tamil.numeral, added capability for generating string version of numerals in Tamil [previously only numeric version was supported]

In addition to the package, a web interface was developed for Open-Tamil in Django hosted at http://tamilpesu.us for demonstrating some of our capabilities.

We like to thank all our contributors in general, and in particular those members who contributed new code or bug fixes going into this release.

Previous release was v0.67 on Aug 23rd, 2017 and v0.65 was released on Oct 22nd 2016. Please share the word, and send us any bugs, feature requests or feedback via our github page https://github.com/Ezhil-Language-Foundation/open-tamil

Sincerely,

Muthu for Open-Tamil team.

Chennai, India.

Open-Tamil user commands

Lot of times we have felt the problem with open-tamil : it has many utilities, but none of them are usually available as functions or commands out of the box. It has very much been a developer tool, and not a user or informed-layperson tool.

A quick fix is to add the example Python scripts to the default install paths along with open-tamil installation [which is still simple as ‘$ pip install –upgrade open-tamil‘].

1. tamilphonetic - convert EN input to Tamil text
2. tamilwordfilter - filter Tamil input only from all input text data
3. tamilurlfilter - filter Tamil text from the input website data
4. tamiltscii2utf8 - convert encoding from TSCII to UTF-8 for input file
5. tamilwordgrid - generate a crossword from Tamil input text and write to output.html file
6. tamilwordcount - like UNIX wc program but for Tamil

All these functions will be made available in version 0.7 of open-tamil to be released soon. Currently these functions have landed in the development branch through the commit 02810461bef216df56b10ebf09818b94dfc75574

The next step should be to really bundle these tools into a binary executable for various platforms. Also to note, the function tamilwordcount was contributed by a new member to the Open-Tamil group, Mr. Surendhar. Thanks much, and welcome!

-Muthu

Chennai, India

நிரல் அலசிஆராய்தல் – art of debugging

Debugging – அதாவது கணினியில் பிழைகளை கண்டு திருத்தம் செய்வது எப்படி ? பைத்தான் மொழியில் இது சற்று சகஜமானது : முழு விவரம் இங்கு.

What is Debugging ?

Computer programs don’t always work like how we want them to. So at times we need to stop the program in the middle of execution and inspect them. By doing that – looking at the variables, functions, statements/source code in the debugger – we can understand the problem better than before and by stepping through the source code we can understand the source of the error to arrive at a solution.

This may sound somewhat complex, but in practice its quite repetitive and you will get the hang of it. Its the equivalent of a software detective work, and it is surprisingly fun, and you keep getting better at it with more practice.

How to Debug Python Code ?

To debug python we use the python module ‘pdb‘ [read documents இங்கு]; pdb is named evocatively like the more famous, powerful gdb – GNU source debugger. The simple usage is to call your program throwing the error from the command line as follows,

$ python -m pdb myscript.py

Once you see the (Pdb) prompt you can do the following:

  1. Setup a breakpoint at a particular function, class or module
  2. Resume the program running and
  3. Wait for the program to enter the breakpoint code or hit an exception
  4. At this time Pdb will enter the breakpoint and give you options to inspect variable, function, the call stack, and step up or down the frames
  5. For exceptions caught by gdb, we can go through the same scope variables and source-stepping inspections only via the post-mortem execution

Finally, you can figure out the cause of the problem and fix it!

Bon Voyage. You are starting on a powerful journey to write cool software and fix buggy ones!

Goodluck, and Godspeed.

open-tamil on web

Today, you are welcome to play with open-tamil API via web at http://tamilpesu.us

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Generating multiplication tables via Open-Tamil APIs’: http://tamilpesu.us/vaypaadu/

This is collective work of our team underlying the website (written in Django+Python) highlighting various aspects of open-tamil like transliteration, numeral generation, encoding converters, spell checker among other things. At this time I hope to keep the website running through most of this year, and add features as git-repo https://github.com/Ezhil-Language-Foundation/open-tamil gets updated.

Thanks to Mr. Syed Abuthahir, many months ago, in winter of 2017, he has developed an interface for open-tamil on the web and shared with us under GNU Affero GPL terms. Later, we is added as part of main open-tamil as well.

Open-Tamil moves forward; come join us!

-Muthu

Tamil Internet Conference 2018 – Coimbatore, India

Tamil internet Conference 2018 to take place at TNAU, Coimbatore, India later this year. Please see call for papers (March 30th deadline) to share your new and upcoming works in Tamil, linguistics and applied computer technology.

Please see the email from Prof. Kalyanasundaram, chair of Tamil Internet Conference – 2018.
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Email from Prof. Kalyan announcing call for papers for Tamil Internet Conference 2018, at TNAU Coimbatore, India.