The Fifth Elephant 2019

India is a land of many languages. There are 23 official and much more unofficial languages prevalently used in day-to-day conversations. Unfortunately, information dissemination to the low resource languages get difficult because of the geo-spatial distances. Popular translation platforms helped to fill this gap in major languages but their efficiency is challenged by the lack of availability of proper datasets and their generic nature. This problem is very evident when more domain information gets involved.

We present Samantar, an open translation suggestion framework targeted at Indian languages. Samantar is built with open parallel corpora and opensource technologies. The translations can be tuned to suggest according to different target domains.

Outline

In this case study, we will be discussing the following areas

• Requirement of a translation systems in social context
• State of current translation systems
• Collation of open corpora for various languages
• Parallel corpora collection in various sectors like Budgets, Judiciary etc..
• Various approaches of translation systems
• Natural Language Processing techniques crucial to translation systems.
• Evaluation and usage of existing open source translation systems like moses, open NMT etc..
• Highlevel architecture of samantar
• Various ways of interacting and colloboration with the framework
• Domain adoptation with the translation framework
• Road ahead

This session addresses following points/areas

• Overview of NLP for Indic Languages
• Open translation systems and their applications
• Open Parallel Corpora available
• A Indic language translation framework
• Challenges working with Indic Languages for NLP
• Domain based translation mechanisms

Speaker bio

Deepthi Chand has been on the forefront of the data-for-good movement in India. Over the last six years he has dabbled in various roles from an application developer in MNCs to a data strategist for various civil-society organizations and government agencies. He is co-founder and director of CivicDataLab, where he works to harness data, tech, design and social science to strengthen civic-engagements in India. He has been leading DataKind Bangalore, a community of data scientists volunteering their time to help non-profits do data-driven decision making over the weekends. He is determined to work on key issues in social sector using open-source software, open data and algorithmic research.

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fTIePdvh0ypiMB5L2RSsdcuSvx57w65YBRre8zZKKXU/edit?usp=sharing