About me:

Sowmya joined Universität Tübingen, Deutschland, in a two year ESR position in April 2011. She works with Prof Detmar Meurers and team on text complexity analysis for information retrieval, in the context of language learning and teaching.

Education:

Sowmya holds a Masters degree in Computer Science & Engineering from IIIT-H, India.
(As a legacy from a previous incarnation, she holds a Bachelors Degree in Engineering (Electronics & Communication)).

Research & Professional Experience:

Sowmya worked in developing methods for Machine Transliteration and Text input for Indian languages (worked for a masters thesis followed by a stay at Microsoft research India). Later, she worked as a search technology developer at a product start-up in India.

Teaching Experience:
Recently co-taught a Hauptseminar “Analyzing complexity and text simplification: Connecting linguistics, processing, and applications“, at the Universität Tübingen, along with Dr Detmar Meurers, during the Winter semester 2011-2012.

Interests:

Multi-lingual information processing and retrieval,  applying language technologies to real life applications, applied Machine Learning and ICT for development.

Oral Presentations:
“On Measures of Text complexity”, With Dr Detmar Meurers, Second Tuebingen-Berlin meeting on analyzing learner language, December 2011.

Publications (Pre-CLARA):
1. Challenges in Designing Input Method Editors for Indian Languages: The Role of Word-Origin and Context,Umair Z. Ahmed, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury and Sowmya VB, In proceedings of the 5th workshop on advances in text input methods, IJCNLP-2011 (Link here)

2. Resource Creation for Training and Testing of Transliteration Systems for Indian Languages, Sowmya V.B, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali, Animesh Mukherjee and Anupam Basu., In Proceedings of LREC-2010, Malta.(Link here)

3. Text input methods for Indian languages, Sowmya V.B, MS Thesis, 2009 (IIIT-H, India)

4. Transliteration based text input for Telugu, Sowmya V.B. and Vasudeva Varma, In Proceedings of 22nd International Conference on Computer Processing for Oriental Languages (ICCPOL) 2009. (Link here)

5. Design and Evaluation of Soft keyboards for Telugu, Sowmya V.B. and Vasudeva Varma, In Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), 2008.