KaReFo

Karky Research Foundation, also known as KaReFo, is a non-profit educational research organisation co-founded by Madhan Karky and Nandini Karky. Their primary focus is on language computing and language literacy. They aspire to 'spread awareness and inculcate in students, a passion for the field of language computing' and aim to 'invent and enhance methods of implementing effective language education and thereby, promote literacy.'^[1].

Beginnings

Prior to the formation of this company, its founders were alumni of Anna University. Madhan Karky served as an Assistant Professor there for a little over three years, where he lectured Computer Science students who were pursuing their Bachelors and master's degrees, as well as coordinated the Tamil Computing Lab at the University. In addition to that, he was actively involved in the Tamil film industry, working as a lyricist and a dialogue writer.

Nandini Karky (née Easwaramorthy) served as a systems engineer for Tata Consultancy Services, based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to KaReFo, they had also collaborated on the Mellinam Foundation, which specializes in content creation for children's educational tools such as books and games, which aims to introduce the Tamil language and incite interest in children to explore science and innovations in Tamil literature.

Madhan Karky resigned from his role at Anna University in January 2013, to focus completely on his work in film as well as with launching the Karky Research Foundation in the following month. Joining the founders in this endeavor were members of Karky's Tamil Computing Lab at Anna University, some of whom have been with the organization since its inception.

The objectives ^[2] of the organization include:

To spread awareness and inculcate among individuals and institutions, a passion for research in language computing.
To function as a resource centre for training, research, documentation and consultancy, in the field of language computing and language literacy.
To motivate students and professionals from various disciplines to apply effective research methodologies to design and develop tools for language literacy and to fund organisations engaged in this endeavor.
To invent and design new modes of imparting language education and to enhance existing modes of language education.
To contribute in diverse ways to economically backward students, all required funding for their educational needs, as well as contribute to educational developmental projects initiated by organisations and the government.

Online Labs

Over the past decade, KaReFo has developed a wide variety of software tools in the field of language computing, all of which are available free of charge. They include ^[3]

Chol: An online dictionary that provides English equivalents to Tamil words and vice versa. Apart from meaning and part of speech, the tool also provides other interesting facts about the Tamil word, like its pleasantness, popularity, fields in which it is used, related words and words with similar pronunciation. This also led to the creation of three online dictionaries ^[4] (Tamil to Tamil, English to Tamil, and Tamil to English), which is presently available on Amazon Kindle eReader devices.

Chariyaa: A spelling and word checker.

Olingoa: A transliterator tool which supports about ten Indian languages, in addition to English.

Paadal: The lyric portal that brings a wide range of song lyrics along with the names of artistes involved, and information on the lyrics like its length, pleasantness etc.

eN: A number to text converter that helps compute simple mathematical operations written in Tamil text and convert the answer back in Tamil text.

Piripori: A word analyser tool that which splits inflected or compounded forms of words. It helps the user to study person, number, gender and tense of words better.

Paeri: A name generator tool which suggests Tamil names which may be in common use, or derived from dictionary or generated by the company algorithm to sound sweet. Its repository presently contains over nine crore names across the male and female gender.

Kural: A Thirukkural portal. The user can search for kurals of a specific topic or number to quote in a speech.

Emoni: A rhyme finder tool, which provides a list of words which rhyme in different rhyme schemes in Tamil, that have been used by poets from three millennia ago.

Aadugalam: A word game portal which helps test one's vocabulary and logic.

Courses

In addition to software tools, KaReFo also provides a wide range of courses ^[5] under the umbrella known as "Payil", which aim to enfranchise non-Tamil speakers to learn the language with ease.

Ezhudhu: A course which aims to teach individuals to read and write Tamil. It has been designed based on extensive research on readability, writability and learnability of languages, with the core objective of making reading and writing Tamil easy and enjoyable.

Paesu: The focus here is to help individuals speak Tamil, specifically the common tongue version of the language.

Ilakkanam: Tamil Grammar is the point of focus here, and presents the essential elements of it from letters to word morphologies to syntax to pragmatics. The course includes games and activities to help with the learning.

Ilakkiyam: The course introduces poems from Sangam literature to modern day lyrics that are rich in literary value. It also explores other literary forms such as stories, scientific literature, stage plays, screen plays and more.

Karuvi: This course enables one to type and search the web in Tamil, to send text messages, emails, and social media posts in Tamil and to work in popular applications such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint in the language.

Kanimozhi: A Tamil computing workshop that teaches the basics of the subject as well as to understand, process and generate Tamil content with pre-developed tools.

Paadal Poriyiyal: A course in lyric engineering, which involves applying scientific and mathematical principles for understanding and creating effective lyrics.

Thibini: A course that aims to teach individuals to read and write the language of KiLiKi, which was created by Madhan Karky for the Baahubali franchise.

Research Publications ^[6]

Idhazhi: A Min-Max Algorithm for Viseme to Phoneme Mapping by Suriyah M., Aarthy Anandan, Madhan Karky Vairamuthu.

International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE) ISSN: 2278–3075, Volume-9 Issue-4, February 2020

Isolating Word Level Rules in Tamil Language for Efficient Development of Language Tools by Suriyah M, Aarthy Anandan, Anitha Narasimhan & Madhan Karky.

International Journal on Natural Language Computing (IJNLC) Vol.8, No.1, February 2019.

Piripori – Morphological Analyser For Tamil by Suriyah M, Aarthy Anandan, Anitha Narasimhan & Madhan Karky.

AISGSC 2019 : International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Smart Grid and Smart City Applications, Coimbatore, Jan 2019.

Pudhaiyal: A Maze-Based Treasure Hunt Game for Tamil Words by Anitha Narasimhan, Aarthy Anandan & Madhan Karky.

International Journal of Cognitive and Language Sciences, Volume:12 No:2, 2018.

Porul: Option Generation and Selection and Scoring Algorithms for a Tamil Flash Card Game by Anitha Narasimhan, Aarthy Anandan, Madhan Karky & Subalalitha CN

International Journal of Cognitive and Language Sciences, Volume:12 No:2, 2018.

Alphabet Elimination Algorithm and Scoring Model for Guess-the-Word Game: Sorkoa by Rajapandian C, Anitha Narasimhan, Aarthy Anandan & Madhan Karky.

ICLL 2018 : 20th International Conference on Language Learning, Mumbai, Feb-2018.

Lyric Basket: Market Basket Analysis Of Tamil Words In Lyrics by Suriyah M, Karthikeyan S, Madhan Karky & Ganapathy V.

International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Volume:115 No:8, 2017.

Simile Generation by Elanchezhiyan K, Tamil Selvi E, Revathi N, Shanthi G P, Shireen S & Madhan Karky.

13th International Tamil Internet Conference, Puducherry, Sep-2014.

A Min-Max Syllable Compaction Method For Tamil Text-To-Speech by Elanchezhiyan K, TamilSelvi E, Suriya M, Karthikeyan S & Madhan Karky

ICON-2013: 10th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, C-DAC Noida, Dec-2013.

A Three-Level Genre Classification For Tamil Words by Karthikeyan S, Nandini Karky, Elanchezhiyan K, Rajapandian C & Madhan Karky.