Statement of purpose

I have a dream: To create or do something that will affect everyones life. After
examining various areas of research in computer science engineering, I zeroed in on
Natural language processing. This is that branch of AI where the machine is made to
process and understand human language hence using it for diverse applications. The
applications are so many that this field has the potential to make a difference in
everyones life. Language is something that is not common to everyone in this world. This
can make information a prerogative for people speaking a widely used language, hence
alienating others in this age of information explosion. Machine translation with the help of
natural language processing is the tool for giving people of different languages access to
the wealth of unlimited information available. Imagine a student from a remote area of
this world who is genuinely interested in gaining knowledge from a resource on the web,
but cannot do so because he cannot understand any language other than his native
language. Nothing can be a better gift for him than a language converter tool using which
he can automatically translate these pages into his language and read them.
Machine translation has been my focus of research for the past two years. I have
been pursuing my undergraduate degree in computer science engineering specializing in
natural language processing. I have been a research assistant in both my semesters
during the senior year here at the Language technologies research centre (LTRC), IIIT
Hyderabad. LTRC is the pioneering research centre in India in the field of natural
language processing. Shakti, the English to Hindi machine translation system developed
here is one of the best of its kind. In my junior undergraduate year, I worked on
Identification of phrasal verbs using a lexicon based approach and later on resolution of
ambiguities in identification of phrasal verbs. I implemented a new algorithm to improve
the performance of this module and it has given good results. It was then that I got an
opportunity to be a student volunteer at the International conference on natural language
processing (ICON-2004) which was held at Hyderabad. Here, I made it a point to attend
all the talks and sessions and interact with the best in the field. It opened a world of
research for me and I was sure that this is the field I want to work in as it had the
potential of making my dream come true.
I love to take up challenges and believe in doing something new and creative. Hence I
have enjoyed working in inter-disciplinary areas as well. Now in my senior year, I have
diversified and am working on Unsupervised learning of morphological analyzers for
inflectionally rich languages as my major project. This project applies machine learning
techniques to language processing. Morphological analyzers are an important part of
machine translation systems. Training a machine to increase the coverage of the
language data (which forms the back end of a morph analyzer) is difficult for Indian
languages which are inflectionally rich. Machine learning is a challenging area and in my
project, I go one step further by designing and implementing an algorithm for rulelearning. This project is expected to yield a research paper on completion.
I have always put in an extra effort in becoming a better and a well rounded person.
Be it academics or extra-curricular activities, I have always given a job the maximum
effort from my side if it interests me. I work with unending passion and dedication to
whatever I am committed to. I believe in team work and there are amazing things that a
team can effect if led properly. I am known for my all-round capabilities right through
school and college and have proven myself as a good leader. I have worked as a teaching
assistant as well, for the same course in two successive semesters. It was then that I
enjoyed the joys of teaching first hand and my students were quite happy with what they
learnt from me. After the research that I have done till date, I can surely say that
pursuing research of a higher order in my graduate studies is my aim and passion. The
immense opportunities and the myriad facilities at University of Colorado which include
state of the art laboratories, research centers and excellent faculty propels me to be a
part of it and add value to it through my own efforts. I plan to apply for an M.S degree in
the fall semester and will positively take a decision on continuing for a PhD at a later
stage. This is because I want to have an exact focus on my PhD topic which I plan to
take up after some initial research.