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Browsing Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology by Author "Thiyam, Jennil"

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    (A) Structure-preserving Document Conversion System for Manipuri Documents in Bengali Script to Meetei Script
    (2023) Thiyam, Jennil
    Manipuri, or Meeteilon, is one of the resource-poor languages of India and the lingua franca of the Indian state of Manipur. Though the Meetei Mayek (Manipuri script) is known to use for writing Manipuri documents since the early \ nth{6} AD, it was banned and replaced with the Bengali script} by the then king of Manipur in the 18th century. Since the late 70s, the Government of Manipur has made an effort to reintroduce Meetei Mayek and included it in Unicode in the year 2009. Meetel Mayek is progressively replacing the Bengali script in schools, colleges, offices, and other places. During the era of using Bengali script as Manipuri writing script (more than 300 years), a huge volume of Manipuri documents has been created in Bengali script. Almost all of the Manipuri literary materials are in Bengali script, and the population in Manipur is broadly divided into - Bengali script literate and Meetei Mayek literate. After a few decades, the majority of the Manipuri population will not be able to read/write Bengali script, creating a huge gap in accessing literary materials. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop an effective system to convert Manipuri documents written in the Bengali script to Meetei Mayek to bridge the script divide. Motivated by the above concern, this thesis focuses on the following three research problems associated with the development of an automatic document conversion system (DCS) for the Manipuri documents in the Bengali script to Meetei Mayek.