About

Venmurasu Programming Team (VPT) is a voluntary community focussed on building a NLP ecosystem for Tamil. Our group has volunteers from alumni, faculty, students of PSG College of Technology (India) and open source NLP enthusiasts with focus on Indian languages.

We established an endowment fund at PSG Tech to conduct coding contests annually. The winners of the contests will work on NLP projects guided by Mentors and Alumni. We need to start small, as such initiatives do consume our time. So, for time being, the contest will be limited to students from PSG Tech. Based on learnings and logistics, we do plan to increase the scale and scope of the contest (within and outside India).

Founding Team

Mentors

  • Gokul NC, Machine Learning Engineer, One Fourth Labs, India
  • Prem Selvaraj, Machine Learning Engineer, One Fourth Labs, India
  • Arulraj V, Senior Technical Lead, IoTium, India

Faculty

Alumni

Contact

Drop us an email – hello@vpt.ai

Looking for Mentors

We are looking for mentors. Please reach out to us – hello@vpt.ai – If you have:

  • Working experience (atleast 2 years) in NLP for Indian languages, especially Tamil.
  • Understanding of state of the art methods and models in NLP:
    — For example, how multilingual models work, what is multi-task training, exploiting information from high-resource languages for low-resource languages.
    — Understanding on how Transformer-based attention models work.
  • Interest in mentoring students for open source Tamil NLP projects (mostly during weekends).
  • [Bonus] If you have open source contributions, experience in publishing research works.

What is Venmurasu?

Venmurasu – 16 out of the 26 novels, 
KambaRamayanam, 
Mahabharatham – BORI critical edition

We named our team as “Venmurasu Programming Team” in the honor of renowned and prolific Tamil Writer B.Jeyamohan. Jeyamohan has finished writing his novel series titled “Venmurasu” (The White Drum) on July 16, 2020. The scope of the work is breathtaking. 26 separate standard fiction length novels, over 25000 pages in print, written over roughly 6.5 years. The author serialized the novels, a chapter a day, since 2014 and concluded on July 2020. Venmurasu is based on the Indian epic, the Vyasa-Mahabharatham. Venmurasu is available for free to read at https://venmurasu.in/

Broadly, what Venmurasu does to the Mahabharatham is what Shakespeare did with the story of Donwald to create Macbeth, or what Wagner did with the Norse myths to create the Ring cycle. It refashions the original with artistic purpose to create a greater whole, a parallel, modern epic.

Venmurasu is a modern literary text, a novel series or roman fleuve like Romain Rolland’s Jean Cristophe or Emilie Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. However Venmurasu differs in that each novel in the series has its own aesthetic, narrative form and vision. There are Tolstoyan multigenerational epics, romantic comedies, poetic novels in versified prose, philosophical novels, fantasies, travel and war novels The entire series traverses a whole gamut of characters, major, minor, mythical and invented, running into several hundreds. They abound with all the delight of novelistic detail – landscapes, histories, mythologies and genealogies, recipes and rituals, technical descriptions of iron-age ships, war implements and Chinese telescopes, forays into various philosophical, religious and artistic schools.

Familiar tales are told and retold and subverted in a variety of voices, juxtaposed against each other to create new readings. Folk and subaltern tales, orthodox narratives, modern and ancient myths, women’s stories, children’s stories and animal stories in a single tapestry. They are layered with the main narrative, resulting in astonishing interpretations and insights into the original epic, that’s still living fabric in India. Then, this insight swings the reader’s gaze back into contemporary society, where much of the same tensions still exist.