Another Feedback about Our Students being Weak in Communication

We had representatives of the Indian Army visiting us today for initial selection to their technical branches such as Engineers, EME and the Signals. At the end of day they did tell us our boys were weak in listening & comprehension as well as speaking. Our students come from Bengali background as well as fro Bihar, Jharkhand area.


Bengal boys were generally weak in speaking English back in our time too. But what happened during the intervening period was that we got rid of English from school curriculum for a very long time. That screwed up the situation further! Bihar and Jharkhand had the problem for a long time as well.


Interestingly we have a peculiar situation in the college. While many times we come up with complaints from some students that our faculty members speak Bengali in the class. Now, if they strictly follow speaking English in the class, the same boys will have problem with that too.


Question that is bugging me is how to solve this problem not only when students face external agencies but also in following the daily classes leading to that event.

Natural Language Processing

I was discussing a possible R&D programme with my colleagues. We did a litt brainstorming and top of the chart item came out to be natural language processing. No wonder it was top of the mind issue for many of my colleagues. It is such a complex area to investigate. Computer implementation of comprehension, learning and the synthesizing natuarl languge is so tough for computers. It is because we derive so much information from body language the tone and inflexions used by the speaker, a lot of contextual information. These contextual stuff may even be unspoken and lot of it is something we pick up on our way in growing up!

However, human babies pick up these skills so quickly and so well. I is the learning abilituies of us human being that makes it so easy to learn these skils. Same goes for writing comprehension as well as actual writing. Humans do it so easily all the time, yet it is so tough for machines. The CAPTCHA used everywhere beats a program most of the time. Yet, one look and you are able to read the CAPTCHA letter/ numbers presented to you!