LANGUAGE AND CULTUREINFORMATION PROCESSING In order to facilitate phonological, lexicological, syntactic as well as historical, ethnological and sociological studies of Asian and African languages, the Institute uses computers to process text data. In the spring of 1978 a main frame computer system, open to use by outside scholars, was installed to accumulate databases of these languages. Bilingual dictionaries of Asian-African and Japanese languages as well as comprehensive grammars for each language have been compiled. To achieve this, we first machine-process the text data, specifying phonological and syntactic information for each linguistic form, and produce sorted-out text data with various application programs, such as KWIC (Key-Word In Context). Due to recent advances in computing, not only textual information, but also image and sound data can be processed by this computer. We are developing a multi-purpose database system which will allow us to retrieve various ethnological data (festival, dance, music and so forth) as well as linguistic corpora. For the purpose of entering various linguistic data we have developed fonts for Devanagari, Burmese, Bengali, Thai, Khmer, Tibetan, Arabic, Korean and Mongolian etc. This system may prove helpful for establishing new ways of carrying out multi-disciplinary research in the field of Asian and African languages and cultures.COMPUTING FACILITIES The computer room of the Institute has housed an HITAC M-640/35 system, which is linked to the UNIX sub-system since March 1993. This computer system consists of a 64 MB memory, two disk units of a total 25 GB, four optical disk units and three magnetic tape-decks. TSS terminals can be used for inputting and three LASER-BEAM printers for outputting. Software has been developed which adapts these printers for printing the scripts of Asian and African languages in various font shapes and sizes. We have also installed a word-usage retrieval system, which is designed to process Asian and African languages in their original scripts without having to convert them into Latin alphabet or numerical forms. This system not only accepts the data in its original scripts, but can also print out word-usages from chosen corpora in their original scripts as well. This system is suitable for linguistic research and also has application in such fields as history and anthropology . Five graphic display terminals are also available, and future plans include the automatization of teaching Asian and African languages, in the form of a CAI (Computer Assisted Instruction) system. In 1993, this system was integrated into a LAN (Local Area Network) which covers the entire Institute; Institute members can tap into any system from their own personal computers, which are connected to the main-frame and sub-system.17
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