Present state and future scope of Assamese text processing

Natural language processing has been a challenging area for researchers in recent times. A lot of research works are conducted to improve the performance of natural language processing that have helped many applications to be made available for our day to day life. Most of the developments have happened only for a few western languages. Researchers have also published some quality works related to Indian languages in recent times. However, the research works conducted for most of the other languages spoken in India, the country with the second largest population in the world, are at a very primitive stage. This paper aims to review the advances in this area for one of the Low Resource Indian languages –“Assamese”, the official language of Assam, the gateway to North East India. It is also spoken in many other states of North Eastern part of India. In this work, we present a highlight of research works related to various methods that are applied to Assamese Text processing. It is observed that certain language characteristics of Assamese are best applicable to certain popular methods used for Natural Language Processing. The reason behind this relook is to overview and report the present state and future possibilities of research in text processing in Assamese. This paper should serve as a good beginning for anyone interested to carry forward the computational works for Assamese. We conclude the paper with a brief discussion on the scope of Assamese Text processing in the future.