CTrans is a department at Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Agra that focuses on interdisciplinary education and research.
The Centre for Transdisciplinary Studies (CTrans) offers various programs in linguistic, computational linguistic, and language technologies.
The center is based in Agra where it runs various academic programs and workshops with the main aim of blending linguistic studies with computational methods.
The center’s emphasis is mainly on the application of language technologies to socio-linguistic development.
CTrans is one of the prestigious colleges for transdisciplinary and linguistic studies in India known for various awards.
Courses Offered in Centre for Transdisciplinary Studies (CTrans)
The Centre for Transdisciplinary Studies, Agra mainly offers two types of courses in the field of transdisciplinary and linguistic studies.
- NLP Courses
- Linguistic Courses
NLP Courses
The Natural Language Processing (NLP) Course is an introductory course in different methods and approaches to the development of language resources with a focus on South Asian / Indian languages.
- Fundamentals of language technologies and computational linguistics
- Different kinds of resources and their applications – text, speech, and multimodal
- Data collection, Processing, and time-aligned transcription (of speech and multimodal data)
- Pre-processing and preparing the text dataset – tokenization, stemming, lemmatization normalization, and data cleaning; Regular Expressions
- Pre-processing and preparing the speech and multimodal datasets
- Infrastructure and representation for language resources – Plain text, CSV, XML, JSON, etc.
- XML, JSON, and other Web Technologies for data sharing and exchange
- Semantic Web, Linked Open Data and SPARQL
- N-gram Language Models – evaluation and smoothing techniques, Laplace, Add-K, Kenser-Ney, and Stupid Backoff Smoothing
- Vector Semantics and Embeddings, (Multilingual) Language Models and Neural Language Models; Contextual Embeddings and Derivatives of BERT
- Large Language Models – open-source models. Prompting and Instruct Tuning
- Data Annotation – manual, semi-automatic and crowdsourced annotations
- Evaluating a dataset; Inter-annotator agreement reliability and measures – Percentage, Cohen’s Kappa, Fleiss Kappa, Krippendorff’s Alpha, etc. Each of the above ideas will be discussed with respect to the three broad sources of data
- Speech and Multimodal Resources and Technologies including Sign Language Resources and Technologies
- Text Resources and Technologies including those needed for OCR and Handwriting Recognition
- Social Media Resources and Technologies including multilingual and multiscriptal processing
- Bias, Fairness, and Ethical Issues in Data Collection, Sampling, and Annotation
- Sharing the language resources – Creative Commons and other Licensing, GitHub, LDC, ELRA and Bhashini / ULCA
Linguistic Courses
The Linguistic course introduces the students to the fundamentals of the interaction of language and society.
It gives an overview of both the effects of sociological factors on human language and different aspects related to language in society and covers key ideas such as multilingualism, variation, social networks, language standardization, politics and attitude, language endangerment, and interactional sociolinguistics.
Eligibility to Apply for M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics
The minimum eligibility to apply for the M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics is graduation or equivalent study in any discipline with a minimum mark of 45%.
Anyone who has scored 45% or above in any discipline of graduation or equivalent is eligible to apply for the course at CTrans in Agra.
Admission Process at CTrans
To get admission to the prestigious Centre for Transdisciplinary Studies, Agra, the candidate needs to pass a written test and an interview conducted by the college itself.
The written test and the interview are designed to test:
- Basic Mathematical / Analytical / Statistical Skills
- Basic awareness of Indian and South Asian Linguistic and Cultural Diversity
- Basic Programming Skills
- Basic awareness of the field of Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics
The candidates are not required to be exceptionally good and have in-depth knowledge about the topics to be able to clear the test.
The test is designed to just check the basic knowledge and awareness about the subject.
Once the test is clear, the candidates will be called for the interview round and then the admission will be given.
Centre for Transdisciplinary Studies Contact Info
| ctrans.coling@gmail.com | |
| University Website | https://dbrau.ac.in/ |
| Location | Professors Colony, Civil Lines, Agra, Uttar Pradesh 282002, India |
| CTrans | |
| YouTube | COLING CTRANS |
Disclaimer: This is not CTrans’s official website. This is a privately owned website with the only aim of providing information best to the knowledge. The Official Website of the university is https://dbrau.ac.in/