Problem / Objective

Language technology holds special relevance in a culturally diverse country like India that has a variety of languages and dialects spoken in its various corners. Through allied abilities such as natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition, it gives machines the ability to comprehend and respond to human texts and speech. Even though the proliferation of mobile devices is intense in the country, the availability of digital information in regional languages in extremely limited, if not entirely negligible. Therefore, innovations in the field have the potential of impacting the lives of billions who still interact primarily in their vernacular language. 

Approach / Solution 

AI4Bharat is a non-profit, open-source community of engineers, domain experts, policy makers and academicians, all collaborating to build AI solutions for solving India’s critical socio-economic and environmental challenges. It is helmed by IIT Madras faculty members Mitesh Khapra and Pratyush Kumar, who aim to improve the digital experience for India's millions of users who access the web in vernacular languages but are challenged by the extremely low availability of information.

As a result of their efforts, they were able to release the largest corpus of Indian language texts and increase the size of corpus available by an order of magnitude in many languages. They are creatively collecting data from different places, and then, building and releasing translation models in Indian languages. Further on, they’re focusing on the transliteration problem, which involves typing in a regional language using an English keyboard, by swapping text in predictive ways. The goal of this initiative is to bring parity in AI technology for Indian languages with English. 

Impact / Implementation

AI4Bharat was part of Google India's first 'AI For Social Good' cohort, where the team worked with the NGO Pratham Books. Recently, they’ve worked with the Nandan Nilekani-backed ‘EkStep Foundation’. Further, they’ve launched a year-long AI residency program to mentor students who have completed their B-Tech. They’re also in talks with the government with regard to the National Language Translation Mission which was announced in this year’s budget. The team at AI4Bharat wants to keep all their models open source with permissible licenses so as to support startups, governments, or companies using these models.

Image from Wikimedia Commons