Hindi to English: Transformer-Based Neural Machine Translation
Kavit Gangar Hardik Ruparel Shreyas Lele
Machine Translation (MT) is one of the most prominent tasks in Natural
Language Processing (NLP) which involves the automatic conversion of texts from
one natural language to another while preserving its meaning and fluency.
Although the research in machine translation has been going on since multiple
decades, the newer approach of integrating deep learning techniques in natural
language processing has led to significant improvements in the translation
quality. In this paper, we have developed a Neural Machine Translation (NMT)
system by training the Transformer model to translate texts from Indian
Language Hindi to English. Hindi being a low resource language has made it
difficult for neural networks to understand the language thereby leading to a
slow growth in the development of neural machine translators. Thus, to address
this gap, we implemented back-translation to augment the training data and for
creating the vocabulary, we experimented with both word and subword level
tokenization using Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) thereby ending up training the
Transformer in 10 different configurations. This led us to achieve a
state-of-the-art BLEU score of 24.53 on the test set of IIT Bombay
English-Hindi Corpus in one of the configurations.