Shata-Anuvadak: Tackling Multiway Translation of Indian Languages

We present a compendium of 110 Statistical Machine Translation systems built from parallel corpora of 11 Indian languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian families. We analyze the relationship between translation accuracy and the language families involved. We feel that insights obtained from this analysis will provide guidelines for creating machine translation systems for specific Indian language pairs. For our studies, we built phrase based systems and some extensions. Across multiple languages, we show improvements on the baseline phrase based systems using these extensions: (1) source side reordering for English-Indian language translation, and (2) transliteration of untranslated words for Indian language-Indian language translation. These enhancements harness shared characteristics of Indian languages. To stimulate similar innovation widely in the NLP community, we have made the trained models for these language pairs publicly available.