Setting up a Neural Machine Translation System for English to Indian

Languages
Natural language translation is one of the most difficult tasks being handled by computer scientist
community. This is certainly one task in which machine is definitely lagging behind the cognitive powers
of human beings. From the initial ages of computer science, a lot of approaches have been proposed for
solving this task. Statistical Machine Translation is one of the conventional and matured ways of solving
the problem of machine translation. This approach is based on Bayes rule and requires huge data sets to
train the system. SMT performs well on similar grammar structured language pairs. In recent years, Neural
Machine Translation (NMT) has emerged as an alternate way of addressing the same issue. In this approach,
we train a Neural network on the source and target language pairs and train the system to develop the
translation rules. In this work, we explore different configurations for setting up a Neural Machine
Translation System for six different Indian languages. We have focused more on Hindi, which is most
widely spoken the language and more datasets are available for this language. We have also deployed the
same system on Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and Malayalam as well. We have experimented with eight
different architecture combinations of NMT for English to Indian Languages and compared our results with
conventional machine translation techniques. We have also observed in this work that NMT requires very
less amount of data size for training and thus exhibits satisfactory translation for few thousands of training
sentences as well.