E-commerce platform Flipkart will work jointly with IIT-Patna to conduct in-depth research in the area of translating content in Indian languages through technology to make non-English speaking users more comfortable to shop online. Flipkart and IIT signed an MoU to work together for enhancing industry-focused applied research in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). 

As a part of this MoU, IIT Patna will undertake a number of programs such as joint research activities, writing research papers, organizing seminars, internship /mentorship and so on. The academic collaboration is expected to bring real-world industry exposure to students and scholars of IIT Patna, and to provide an opportunity to the faculty member(s) to work closely with Flipkart on research projects, said a statement from Flipkart. 

“ The aim behind this collaboration is to create industry-focused applied research which could help reach e-commerce to more consumers and sellers alike. With this MoU, we aim to establish deeper academia collaborations which could help students and the academia to leverage our data and platform knowledge to work on India specific e-commerce challenges, in addition to publishing research papers,” said Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist Flipkart. 

According to Asif Ekbal, associate professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Patna, the research is particularly aimed at developing robust machine translation techniques for translating the large number of user reviews written in English to the Indian vernacular languages.

“It will ensure that the translation process should preserve the domain knowledge like sentiment, emotion, gender traits etc., which is extremely crucial for the translation service providers (TSPs) that make use of machine translation (MT) in production. Through this initial collaboration, we expect to come up with at least two high-quality publications in the relevant forums, and create a baseline translation workflow in the product column domains,” he said. Ekbal added that this academic collaboration is expected to bring real-world industry exposure to the students and scholars of IIT Patna, and at the same time will provide an opportunity to the faculty member(s) to work closely with Flipkart on research projects.