Watch: IBM India CTO Gargi Dasgupta on the NLP research roadmap for Indian languages

Natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of technology major IBM have come a long way since 2011, when the organisation’s computer took part in a game show Jeopardy to the launch of its Project Debater in 2019.

“Last year, we launched debater which is a project where it's just not question and answering, but it's understanding a topic and collecting artefacts that could help you argue either against or for a topic,” Gargi Dasgupta, director, IBM Research India and chief technology officer, IBM India/ South Asia told TechCircle.

Dasgupta is at the forefront of NLP research in India. In her current role, she is responsible for executing projects under IBM's India Research Lab and collaborating with IBM’s worldwide ecosystem. As the CTO she is also tasked with representing the company’s overall technical strategy to developers, startups and key clients.

In an interview with TechCircle, Dasgupta spoke about how far India has come in terms of NLP and the different research projects undertaken within IBM’s Indian research facilities.

Considering that India is a key market for IBM and also possesses a host of languages with different scripts and dialects, Dasgupta gave TechCircle a sneak peek into how NLP is being advanced in local Indian languages such as Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil. She also pointed out the challenges and the road ahead for widespread adoption of NLP through AI.

From virtual assistants from banks to Alexa and Siri, solutions with natural language processing or NLP in the backend have become commonplace. In India, IBM is pushing  the boundaries of NLP research to include more local languages.

Launched in 1998, IBM Research India, the research and development division for the Big Blue in the country has two locations in Delhi and Bengaluru and has recently set up a team in Singapore.  The Research Labs currently focus extensively on how artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to the world of hybrid cloud, with NLP being one of the key areas.

Read: IBM equips enterprise AI platform Watson with upgrades from Project Debater