Neural machine translation of Hindi and English

Abstract

Translation has been one of the oldest problems in natural language processing. Despite its age, it is still one where there is a tremendous scope for improvement and creativity; the quantity and quality of research in it is testament to that fact. The subfield of primarily using deep neural networks for translation has recently started to gain traction. Many techniques have been developed using deep encoder-decoder networks for bilingual translation using both parallel as well as non-parallel corpora. There is a lot of potential in applying concepts such as bilingual embeddings to create generic translation architecture, which doesn’t need huge parallel corpora to train. These ideas are particularly pertinent in the case of Indic languages, where it is generally difficult to obtain such corpus. In this paper, we try to adapt some of newest techniques in autoencoder networks and bilingual embeddings to the task of translating between English and Hindi. The models considerably outperform state of the art translating systems for these languages.