Our partner in Ethiopia, Dr. Solomon Atnafu of Addis Ababa University (AAU), is encouraging one of his master course students to develop an Ethiopic search engine. He has been contacting with us to provide LOP's language identification module to support his team's development work.

During my recent visit to Ethiopia, myself and Dr. Kodama had a discsussion with his team at his laboratory (see photo).

What his team is doing are;
1) Collect UTF-8 encoded Ethiopic pages using existing search engines
2) Using above result as a seed-URL, collect Ethiopic pages by their own crawler
3) Use our language identification module (LIM) to screen out UTF-8 Ethiopic pages
4) Index above pages and save them into database

While they are recognizing the existence of local proprietary encodings of Ethiopic text, they have no plan ro collect those pages because so many different such encodings are used, and it seems almost difficult to convert all of them into UTF-8.

I am really hoping their success.

Library Tour

Mikami Sensei describing the Chuetsu Earthquake (2004/10/23) after effect by showing a pictorial of damaged structures on houses, roads etc.
From Left: Baden Hughes, Valaxay Dalaloy, Timothy Baldwin, Ali Selamat, Chea Sok Huor, Yoshiki Mikami, Chew Yew Choong, Virach Sornlertlamvanich & Canasai Kruengkrai (hardly visible)

Server Room Tour
Recently installed new server clusters as addition to the first cluster.

Although our language idenfication module (LIM) is using UDHR text as a training data, several language versions of UDHR is not available and we have to employ other texts in replace of UDHR. Our partners have collected such traning data for this purpose. The following list shows such set of texts.

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Language	Script	Encoding	Name of contributor	Bytes	Date
Kazakh	Cyrillic	UTF-8	Ahmed Tarcan	15,501	2006/03/24
Kirgiz	Cyrillic	windows-1251	Ahmed Tarcan	11,485	2006/03/24
Tatar	Latin	windows-1254	Ahmed Tarcan	11,673	2006/03/24
Turkmen	Latin	windows-1250	Ahmed Tarcan	40,109	2006/03/24
Uygurche	Latin	ISO 8859-9	Ahmed Tarcan	23,342	2006/03/24
Uzbek	Cyrillic	windows-1251	Ahmed Tarcan	21,244	2006/03/24
Uzbek	Latin	windows-1251	Ahmed Tarcan	19,659	2006/03/24

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Name of Advisor	Affiliation	Location
Claudio Menezes	UNESCO	Paris, France
Paul Hector	UNESCO	Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Adama Samassekou	ACALAN	Bamako, Mali
Emmanuel Sagara	ACALAN	Bamako, Mali
David Dalby	Linguasphere Observatory	Wales, UK
Debbie Garside	Linguasphere Observatory	Wales, UK
Om Vikas	TDIL, Ministry of IT	New Delhi, India
Ahmad Zaki Abu Bakar	Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)	Johor Bahru, Malaysia
Ali Selamata	UTM	Johor Bahru, Malaysia
Virach Sornlertlamvanich	TCL/NICT	Bangkok, Thailand
Canasai Kruengkrai	TCL/NICT	Bangkok, Thailand
Thatsanee Charoenporn	TCL/NICT	Bangkok, Thailand
Timothy Baldwin	The University of Melbourne (UniMelb)	Melbourne, Australia
Baden Hughes	UniMelb	Melbourne, Australia
Chea Sok Huor	PAN Localization	Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Valaxay Dalaloy	Science Technology & Environment Agency	Vientiane, Lao PDR
S.T. Nandasara	University of Colombo	Colombo, Sri lanka
Sebastiano Vigna	Milano University	Milano, Italy
Paolo Boldi	Milano University	Milano, Italy
Massimo Santini	Milano University	Milano, Italy
Michael Stack	Internet Archive	San Fransisco, USA
Gordon Mohr	Internet Archive	San Fransisco, USA
Hammam Riza	IPTEKnet, BPPT	Jakarta, Indonesia
Hajime Ohiwa	Keio University	Fujisawa, Japan
Ikechukwu Anyanwu	Placade Japan	Nagaoka, Japan
Kozo Ishizaki	NUT	Nagaoka, Japan
Ario Ohsato	NUT	Nagaoka, Japan
Mitsuru Kano	NUT	Nagaoka, Japan
Masahiro Iwahashi	NUT	Nagaoka, Japan
Takashi Yukawa	NUT	Nagaoka, Japan
Kazuhide Yamamoto	NUT	Nagaoka, Japan

Ohiwa Laboratory - CreW
Keio University, Shonan-Fujisawa Campus(SFC), Japan

Research Institute for Language and Culture of Asia and Africa
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS), Tokyo, Japan

Fakulti Sains Komputer & Sistem Maklumat (FSKSM)
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Johor, Malaysia

University of Miskolc, Miskolc, Hungary

The Laboratory for Web Algorithmics(LAW)
Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione
Università degli Studi di Milano(USM), Milano, Italy

Linguasphere Observatory, Wales, UK

Yamana Laboratory
Deaprtment of Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory (TCL), Bangkok, Thailand

Technology Development of Indian Languages (TDIL)
Department of Information Tecnology, New Delhi, India

Excel Solutions, Singapore

Placade Japan, Co., Nagaoka, Japan

Numerics Inc., Fujisawa, Japan

CT Solutions, Tokyo, Japan

Center of International Cooperation for Computerization, Tokyo, Japan

Saora Inc., Cupertino, CA, U.S.A. & Yokohama, Japan

Kumari Co. Ltd. Musashino, Tokyo, Japan

Communication & Information, UNESCO, Paris, France

Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)