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Draft:Niladri Sekhar Dash

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Niladri Sekhar Dash
Born (1967-12-31) December 31, 1967 (age 57)
Shabra, West Midnapur, West Bengal, India
Academic background
EducationUniversity of Calcutta (B.A., 1988; M.A., 1991, PhD, 2001)

Niladri Sekhar Dash (born 31 December 1967) is an Indian academic.

Early life and education

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Niladri Sekhar Dash was born on 31 December 1967 in a remote village named Shabra, located in the district of West Midnapur, West Bengal, India. Growing up in a village close to the state of Odisha, Dash developed a strong affinity for the Odia language due to the influence of his Odia-speaking neighbors. He speaks Odia as fluently as his mother tongue, Bengali. His father, Birendranath Dash, was primarily a paddy cultivator and also worked at a local health center collecting blood samples from nearby villages for malaria testing. His mother was a homemaker. Niladri has two brothers who continue to reside in the village, while his two elder sisters are married and settled in other villages in the district.

Dash began his education at the village primary school at the age of five. As a first-generation learner, his family lacked an academic environment. However, his mother set a goal for her children to achieve at least a Class-X standard.

He completed his Higher Secondary Education in 1985 and pursued a B.A. in English Literature and Language at the RK Mission Residential College, Narendrapur, earning his degree from the University of Calcutta in 1988. His higher education was facilitated by financial support from the RK Mission Residential College due to his academic excellence and financial need. In 1991, he earned an M.A. degree in Linguistics from the University of Calcutta, standing second in his class. Ten years later, in 2001, he obtained his Ph.D. from the same university for his thesis titled Corpus-Based Computational Analysis of the Modern Bengali Language.

Career

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Following his M.A., Niladri worked in various roles to sustain himself. Initially, he joined a secondary school in Kolkata as a contractual teacher but left due to workplace challenges. He later served as a part-time teacher in the Department of English at New Alipore College, teaching English philology. In 1993, he joined the TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages) project of the Government of India in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, where he worked on language technology projects until 1995. During this time, he also participated in training on Natural Language Processing (NLP) at IIT Kanpur.

Returning to Kolkata in 1995, Niladri faced significant hardships, working in roles such as English language tutor, data entry operator, record keeper, and voter list typist. In 1997, he began contributing voluntarily to the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, to develop a modern Bengali text corpus for NLP research. His efforts paid off when he was appointed as a Junior Technical Assistant at ISI’s CVPR Unit, where he worked on digitizing a printed Bengali dictionary. In 2005, he joined the Linguistic Research Unit (LRU) at ISI and, after relentless dedication, became an Assistant Professor on 15 July 2010. This marked the beginning of a stable academic career.

Currently, Niladri Sekhar Dash serves as a Professor and Head of the Linguistic Research Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Since 1992, he has been engaged in research areas including Corpus Linguistics, Language Processing, Language Technology, Digital Lexicography, Computer-Assisted Language Teaching, Indigenous Language Documentation and Digitization, Digital Humanities, Ethnography, and studies on bilingual aphasic and Alzheimer’s patients.

Dash has been an International Visiting Fellow of the British Academy, UK (2018), a Visiting Scholar at the Language and Brain Laboratory, University of Oxford (2019), and a Visiting Fellow at University College London (2023). From 2018 to 2027, he has been selected as a Visiting Scholar at the School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, UK.

Academic contributions

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Dash has published 17 research monographs, 2 edited volumes, and over 300 research papers in international and national journals, anthologies, and conference proceedings. He has delivered academic lectures and taught various courses at more than 100 universities and institutions worldwide. In 2023, he received the British Academy Leverhulme Small Research Grant Fellowship for intensive research on language loss among bilingual Indian aphasic patients.

Roles and recognitions

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Dash holds numerous roles in Indian and international academic and governmental organizations. He has contributed to institutions like NSF-USA, UNESCO, the British Academy, and the Oxford Dictionary, and has collaborated with governments of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Serbia. He serves as the Principal Investigator for three research projects funded by the Government of India and is the Co-Principal Investigator for an international project.

2025 Program Committee Member: International Conference on FOSS Approaches towards Computational Intelligence and Language Technology (FOSS-CIL T25), International Centre for Free and Open Source Solutions (ICFOSS), Govt. of Keraka, Trivandrum, 22-24 January 2025.
2022-2025 "Vidyaapati: a system for bidirectional Machine Translation involving Bengali, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, and Hindi": MEITY, Govt. of India: Principal Investigator: Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharya, Indian Institute Technology -Mumbai.
2024- Editor-in-Chief: International Journal of Translation (IJT) (ISSN 0970-9819)
2024- Editor-in-Chief: Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJOAL) (ISSN 0379-0037)
2024- Editorial Board Member: Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistics (ISSN: 0974-3421 (print); ISSN: 0974-3421 (online)). Dept. of Linguistics. Kashmir University, Srinagar, Kashmir, India.

References

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