Dr. Shantanu Kumar is a Junior Resource Person at the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. He is primarily a linguist with a passion for leveraging technology, pedagogy, and data-driven research to advance language technologies, particularly for Indian languages. He holds a PhD and an MA in Linguistics from the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, and Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, respectively. He contributed to developing Maithili Anulekhika, a pioneering speech recognition tool that marks the first instance of speech technology support for Maithili, a low-resource language.
As a multilingual team leader, Dr. Kumar is dedicated to bridging traditional linguistic knowledge with technological innovation and rigorous academic standards. He has been instrumental in creating numerous datasets crucial to language technology development. He has coordinated numerous workshops and conferences related to computational linguistics, data collection, and language documentation. He has co-authored multiple peer-reviewed publications and book chapters on topics related to corpus and computational linguistics. He is passionate about language documentation, digital humanities, and inclusive language technologies, with a long-term vision to integrate linguistic heritage with cutting-edge AI applications.
As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Dr. Kumar is teaching Hindi at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin. He is actively engaged in exploring American cultural diversity and promoting India’s social and linguistic heritage. His future aspirations include establishing inter-university collaborations through the adoption of trans-disciplinary approaches in language learning and teaching.