Neural Machine Translation of Indian Languages

Abstract

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a new technique for machine translation that has led to remarkable improvements compared to rule-based and statistical machine translation (SMT) techniques, by overcoming many of the weaknesses in the conventional techniques. We study and apply NMT techniques to create a system with multiple models which we then apply for six Indian language pairs. We compare the performances of our NMT models with our system using automatic evaluation metrics such as UNK Count, METEOR, F-Measure, and BLEU. We find that NMT techniques are very effective for machine translations of Indian language pairs. We then demonstrate that we can achieve good accuracy even using a shallow network; on comparing the performance of Google Translate on our test dataset, our best model outperformed Google Translate by a margin of 17 BLEU points on Urdu-Hindi, 29 BLEU points on Punjabi-Hindi, and 30 BLEU points on Gujarati-Hindi translations.