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Towards a language independent Net

THIS TIME NetSpeak profiles the exciting features of the ongoing project to develop an electronic language infrastructure that allows people to communicate with others using their mother tongue.

Though the Net, through its various services, enables netizens worldwide to collaborate and communicate instantaneously, lack of a common language continues to be a major bottleneck in its further progress. As most of the content available on the Net is in English and a few other languages, many still find it difficult to effectively use the global network.

While many tools/services have been developed for translating web pages and other materials from one language to another, these may not always do a perfect job. Most of the time you may get only a rough idea of the content. And if you have no idea about the alien language, you have no mechanism to check the correctness of the translated content.

For the Net to become a universal communication medium, it should provide necessary tools that let every user to express his opinion/thoughts/content in his own language. The Universal Networking Language project whose objective is to create Net-based tools that enable netizens to communicate in their own language is worth exploring in this context.

Universal Networking Language

Universal Networking Language is a project initiated by the Institute of Advanced Studies (http://www.ias.unu.edu) of the United Nations University (http://www.unu.edu/), which is an "international community of scholars that acts as a think tank for the United Nations.'' The project now under the UNDL foundation (http://www.undl.org/#), attempts to create an "electronic language that will act as an Internet intermediary between different world languages.''

The UNL is "an electronic language for computers to express and exchange every kind of information.'' The meaning of each sentence in a text is captured in a UNL expression.

According to UNL experts, each sentence from a natural language text can be represented as a "hyper-graph with concept words (known also as universal words) as nodes and relations as arcs.'' (If you are unfamiliar with the concept of graphs, hyper-graphs and so on, check out http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/ graph.html).

You may check out the link http://www.unlc.undl.org/publications/UNL - beyond%20MT.html to get a better understanding of how the UNL equivalent of a natural language sentence is constructed. It is claimed that UNL specifications are sufficient to represent information in a sentence reasonably accurately. In this regard you may view the Italian language centre site — where you can find many simple examples of converting sentences from a natural language to UNL (http://unl.ilc.pi.cnr.it/LSMain.htm). The process of converting a natural language document to UNL form is called enconversion and the reverse process is called deconversion. In the UNL system the component that contains an enconverter/deconverter tools is called a language server.

Advantages

Once the UNL technology is in place and available widely, a netizen can compose content in his native language through a UNL-editor, which will automatically convert the document into the intermediary language with the help of a language server. Once the document is available in UNL form, it can be converted to any other language provided the target natural language has a language server. That is, if you compose your web page in Tamil, the Tamil UNL language server will automatically convert the text into UNL form. Now, if your friend wants to read it in Hindi, he can read it through an UNL-enabled viewer. Thus, once the UNL components are available as browser plug-ins, anyone on the Net can read any foreign texts in a language of his choice.

To develop the intermediary system for various languages, UNL language centres have been formed. The Italian language centre (http://unl.ilc.pi.cnr.it/), Russian language centre (http://www.unl.ru/), Spanish language centre (http://piramides.dia.fi.upm.es/CLE/english/unlproject.htm) and Indonesia centre (http://nlp.aia.bppt.go.id/unl/) are examples.

Apart from this, many UNL-based projects are under way. The project `EPT-Web' (http://www.nilc.icmc. usp.br/nilc/projects/ept-web.htm), for creating an "English-Portuguese web translator'' is an interesting example.

The following are some UNL Resources:

UNL, A gift for Millenium: http://www.unlc.undl.org/publications /gm/index.htm

An informative article on UNL: http://www.worldbank.org/mdf/mdf4/ papers/abdelrahim.pdf

A graphical introduction to the UNL system: http://www.unlc.undl. org/unlsys/introduction.html

Zoe: An e-mail client with web interface

Net users use mail clients to download mails from their mail server and efficiently manage them. But, if one wants to get a message received on a specific date, most of the popular clients do not have an easy mechanism. You have to sort the messages according to date and then move on to the entry with this date to retrieve the mails concerned. It would help if the mail client has a calendar interface that allows the user to directly click on a date to get all the messages arrived on this date displayed. The open-source e-mail client program, Zoe, written in Java, is a tool that has this feature. Apart from a calendar tool, Zoe has a web interface that allows you to access your mail from anywhere on the web. Another notable feature is that it comes with powerful search features and many built-in services. The program features such services as web server, SMTP server and POP server.

An interesting feature is that when it displays a set of messages, it also lists out additional information on the displayed mails under such headings as Contributors (senders' names), Links (web addresses contained in the messages) and Attachments. These information bits give more clues on the mails before you read them.

Download the archive file (http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/) and unpack it using winzip or a similar program. The unpacking process will create a directory called Zoe and stores the entire program-related file under this directory. Once the program starts running, you can access it through the browser by typing in the address: http:// 127.0.0.1:10080/. To set-up the program for your e-mail accounts, access the button labelled `Zoe' and enter the required information.

J. Murali

Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in

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