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Science, Technology  and Innovation  Policy 2020

Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020

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Give your feedback on  National Research Foundation 2020

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This is the fourth blog in the series Machine Translation: An Overview by Dr. S. K. Srivastava.

The advances in recent years in India and across the world led to launch a mission with a focus on machine translation. The Natural Language Translation Mission was initiated on the recommendations of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC) to make use of the technology in the translation of content into Indian languages. The objective of the mission is to make the opportunities and progress in science and technology accessible to all citizens in their mother tongue. Using a combination of machine and human translation, the mission aims at enabling access to teaching and research material bilingually – in English and one’s native Indian language.

While MeitY is leading the mission, other agencies involved are M/o Education and DST. The mission will engage industry and academia to develop efficient text-to-text and speech-to-speech machine-aided translation systems for Indian languages. To accomplish this task, it will make use of the existing technologies and support the development of new technologies as well. While R&D activities will be carried out at academic institutions to develop more accurate and efficient systems, significant efforts will be made to develop deployable systems using the currently available technologies and datasets.

Two pilot projects were sponsored (by MeitY and Office of PSA) to a consortium of academic institutions led by IIIT Hyderabad to develop and deploy speech-to-speech translation systems using the existing technology developed under the TDIL Programme. Under the pilot project sponsored by the Office of PSA, the components of a system have been developed for speech-to-speech translation of the video lectures created under the National Programme on Technology Enabled Learning (NPTEL). The performance of the modules of the system has been demonstrated. Under the pilot project sponsored by MeitY, the work is progressing on the development of ASR and speech synthesis systems at IIT Madras, translation among the Indian languages at IIIT Hyderabad, translation from English to Indian languages at C-DAC and IIT Madras. Each of the institutions has made significant progress.

Under the mission, a platform Bhashini is being developed for facilitating the MT activities in the country. The corpora available in the country are being collated so that one can access it through this platform. Several modules are being developed for collecting various types of content from the public. This will have a module for collecting spoken content, another module for collecting textual content in Indian languages. The objective is to involve volunteers from the public who are willing to contribute to improving the resources for the languages of their interest. 

Several challenges are being planned to involve private entrepreneurs in getting technology solutions developed. In one of such challenges, consultations have been done with Election Commission, NCERT, Vigyan Prasar for their participation. The user agencies will not only provide data that is necessary for developing a customized solution for their domain but will also help in testing the systems to be developed by the participating development teams. Once these systems are found to have satisfactory performance, the user agencies will scale up the systems in their offices. 

Conclusion

The article has provided an overview of MT. Since the early fifties, R&D activities have been progressing in several countries in this area. As it happens in any area of technology, in the beginning, the expectations were quite high, and therefore, there have been several ups and downs. Though open-domain universal   MT continues to be one of the most challenging areas of technology development, several MT systems have been developed for specific domains and specific language pairs. In the recent past, there has been phenomenal progress in the field due to the advent of neural processing and it has become possible to achieve good accuracy. The industry too has responded and now MT is being offered as a service in more than 100 languages by multiple IT companies. Though some progress has been made in speech translation as well, this, however, is still limited to sentence level in a limited context. 

India too has been working in this area for almost four decades and several good prototypes and baseline systems have been developed by researchers from several institutions. With the availability of open-source MT platforms, several private entrepreneurs have also developed their solutions. Many private entrepreneurs are providing MT services to the corporate sector using the MT platforms of major IT companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon, etc. 

The mission being initiated will further support R&D as well as solutions development by involving academic institutions and entrepreneurs. Apart from improving the quality of the existing translation solutions, academic institutions will also work towards developing the systems for the low-resource Indian languages which have been left out by the commercial entities. This will especially be useful for central and state government institutions which are the largest users of the translation services. 

Other blogs in this series:
Summary and Abstract
1.    Machine Translation: Introduction
2.    Machine Translation: The International scenario
3.    Machine Translation: The National scenario

Acknowledgement

While preparing the article, several experts were consulted for their views and suggestion. Their contributions are gratefully acknowledged. In particular, I would like to thank Dr. P. K. Saxena and Prof. G. N. Jha for their suggestions. 

Disclaimer

The views presented in the article are those of the author and not the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. Any comments/suggestions may be sent to the author at sks@meity.gov.in

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