Punjabi Technology Projects ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਤਕਨੀਕੀ ਪ੍ਰਾਜੈਕਟ
Punjabi is one of the world’s great languages, spoken by over 90 million people, yet its presence in the digital sphere still lags far behind. Today, we stand at a turning point: with the right technology, we can unlock new possibilities for learning, creativity, and communication in Punjabi.
We are a team of technologists and educators with expertise in AI, machine learning, natural language processing, web & mobile development, and data science along years of experience teaching Punjabi. Aside from building Punjabi learning and language tools, we have curated several large Punjabi datasets (news, literature, movies, lyrics, dictionaries, word forms, etc.) and programming utilities. These are the foundations on which the next generation of Punjabi digital tools will be created. We are open to connecting with motivated students and collaborators who want to take part in meaningful projects at the intersection of technology and language. Our goal is to have all projects be open-source to encourage further development and collaboration.
We’ve already collaborated with students on projects such as expanding the Punjabi dictionary by thousands of words, building a colloquial chatbot, and creating games, interactive learning exercises, grammar content, and tools for learners - many of which are available on this website. Below, are described several projects that have been deemed high impact for the advancement of Punjabi technology. If you are interested in any of these projects, have an idea of your own, want to discuss, or have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]
Punjabi Language Model
Overview: A high quality Punjabi language model does not yet exist, but is increasingly easy to build given the latest large language models' base understanding of Punjabi. A high-quality and open-source Punjabi LLM would be a major step forward in developing other Punjabi language technology and applications.
Impact: Establishes a common foundation for translation, summarization, education, accessibility, and cultural preservation—accelerating every other Punjabi tech project and enabling community contributions.
Further Development:
- Punjabi LLM based applications (chatbots, translation, summarization, etc.)
- Punjabi RAG pipelines over Punjabi archives for smart search tools
- Punjabi chatbot for learning and conversation
Punjabi Dictionary Expansion
Overview: Tens of thousands of Punjabi words and expressions remain undocumented in existing dictionaries. Using our extensive text corpora, we can build the most comprehensive Punjabi lexicon to date — a vital tool for learners, teachers, and developers.
Impact: Powers search, spell-check, grammar tools, curriculum design, and NLP tasks (tokenization, lemmatization, NER)—raising the overall quality of Punjabi content online and in classrooms.
Development:
- Search text corpora for new words and phrases
- Add word forms, usage notes, and dialect/register tags
- Include audio pronunciations and inflections
- Provide example sentences and translations
- Release open APIs and CSV exports for developers and educators
Punjabi Grammar Checker
Overview: A system for identifying incorrect grammar and ideally also highlighting the reason for the incorrect grammar. A tool like this does exist https://pgc.learnpunjabi.org/, but is closed-source and can be significantly improved upon. Given the work already done on collecting dictionary data, word-form data, and organizing grammatical rules, this is now easier.
Impact: Improves writing quality for students, professionals, and media; supports standardized testing and publishing; and provides feedback loops to strengthen language learning at scale.
Further Development:
- Hybrid rule-based + ML grammar checking
- Foundation for Punjabi word editor
- Explain-why feedback messages for learners
Gurmukhi–IPA Conversion
Overview: Help bridge speech and text: a precise Gurmukhi–IPA converter would power accurate pronunciation tools, text-to-speech systems, and transliteration across scripts. We’ve begun collecting pronunciation data — this is the next big step.
Impact: Enables accurate TTS/ASR, pronunciation training for learners, and consistent cross-script mappings—improving accessibility and interoperability across platforms.
Further Development:
- Foundation for text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems
- Foundation for transliteration to other scripts
Gurmukhi–Shahmukhi Conversion
Overview: An accurate Gurmukhi-Shahmukhi transliteration algorithm will help consolidate the datasets and technology already built for each respective script. A tool for transliteration exists https://sangam.learnpunjabi.org/, but consistently makes some spelling mistakes which precludes its use for automating the conversion of large datasets. An existing mapping between >50K Gurmukhi-Shahmukhi pairs has been prepared as a starting point.
Impact: Connects communities and content across scripts, enables bi-script publishing, and allows training unified models over larger combined corpora.
Further Development:
- Auto transliteration of literature and news
- Punjabi reader tool usable across scripts
- Writing tools and plugins to easily publish content across scripts
Gurmukhi OCR
Overview: A high quality OCR system will be necessary for a large-scale digitization of printed Gurmukhi texts. This will, in addition to benefiting readers, help create a massive amount of data that will be very beneficial to developing machine learning models and doing more sophisticated text analyses. While some models exist and perform quite well in general (Google, tesseract), they tend to perform poorly on older printed texts which of course comprise much of the current untranscribed text.
Impact: Unlocks vast archives (books/newspapers) for search, education, and research; produces training data for downstream NLP; preserves cultural heritage.
Further Development:
- Mass OCR transcription of old Punjabi books and newspapers
- Generation of datasets for creating other AI models and tools
- Essential for high accuracy document and image processing tools and apps useful across industries