Dula Bankira hails from the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha. He is belongs to the Ho tribe and worked as a daily labour and gardener in Bhubaneswar prior to joining KISS. 2004 turned to be a turning point in the life of Dula, when he joined KISS and earned the credit of being the first batch of +2 Science to graduate from KISS. He continued higher education at KISS and became a part of the first graduating and post graduating batch of KISS. Dula’s quest for knowledge translated in his completion of Ph.D. He has successfully completed Ph.D. under the School of Indigenous Knowledge, Science and Technology. The degree was awarded under the joint supervision of Dr. Srinibas Panda, Associate Professor, KISS-DU and Dr. Satya Ranjan Dash, Associate Professor KIIT-DU. Dr. Dula Bankira worked on “Computational Linguistics for Ho Language”, a topic which holds lot of relevance for KISS-DU. Tribal languages are on the verge of extinction and it can be revived with the use of technology. This unique research work will act as a prototype to revitalize and document other indigenous languages.
While putting forth the gist of his research he added that Automatic Machine Translation is the most important vehicle for understanding tribal language and conveying information. They have different languages, cultures, customs, myth, traditions, etc. Orally, they are communicating in their own language and transmit it from generation to generation. But, English is used worldwide for communication purposes. It is used for exchanging information and gaining knowledge. Currently, we are manually translating tribal language into English which is a challenging task. So, in this digital age, it is required to translate
automatically through the computer system of tribal Language using different model. The main objective of this thesis is to develop Parts of Speech of Ho Language, Dependency Treebank, Extractive Text Summarization, Automatic Machine Translation and Language Detection of Ho. The above-mentioned areas were incorporated keeping in mind the various approaches used to understand Ho language.
On being asked his about his journey and experiences, he said that “I am thankful to Hon’ble Founder KISS and KIIT, Dr. Achyuta Samanta for giving me this opportunity and I feel proud that my work will be helpful for KISS in its endeavour to protect, promote and preserve indigenous languages. Further, I would also like to put to use my research work at the Centre for Indigenous Languages and Narratives, which has been established at KISS-DU.”
