All areas of language and speech technology must deal, in one way or another, with real text. Real text is messy: many things one nds in text | numbers, abbreviations, dates, currency amounts, acronyms . . . | are not standard words in that one cannot nd their properties by looking them up in a dictionary or deriving them morphologically from words that are in a dictionary, nor can one nd their pronunciation by an application of \letter-to-sound" rules. For many applications, such non-standard words | NSW's | need to be normalized, or in other words converted into standard words. Since the correct normalization of a given token often depends upon both the local context and the type (genre) of text one is dealing with, \text-normalization" is in general a very hard problem. Typical technology for text-normalization mostly involves sets of ad hoc rules tuned to handle one or two genres of text (often newspaper-style text), with the expected result that the techniques, do...

The Brahmi-derived Indic scripts occupy a special place in the study of writing systems. They are alphasyllabic scripts (Bright, 1996a) (though Daniels (1996) prefers the term abugida), meaning that they are basically segmental in that almost all segments are represented in