Flipkart has partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna to jointly conduct research into Neural Machine Translation, a technology that can be used in translating text from English to regional Indian languages, as the Walmart-owned company makes a big push into tier II and tier III markets.
Neural Machine Translation is an approach of translation that uses artificial neural networks to predict a sequence of words, and is seen as one of the most cutting-edge techniques to translate text from one language to another. Researchers at IIT Patna are among the leading experts in this space in the country.
“This partnership with IIT Patna is in the context of that next 200 million user acquisition,” said Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist at Flipkart. “It is therefore imperative for us as a company to collaborate with the best of minds in India, who understand the Indian domain, Indian languages, and innovate to make e-commerce happen for Bharat.”
Datar added that current solutions for translating Flipkart’s catalogue and other aspects of its website and app are not the best performing when it comes to regional Indian languages. While the company has already done work to translate its app into Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada, it says a lot of work is required to seamlessly do so in more regional languages.
Flipkart, under the partnership, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with IIT Patna to jointly conduct research into fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural language processing, writing research papers, organising seminars and providing internship and mentorship opportunities for students of IIT Patna.
“The research is particularly aimed at developing robust machine translation techniques for translating the large amount of user reviews written in English to the Indian vernacular languages,” said Asif Ekbal, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Patna.
The partnership will also help researchers at IIT Patna with access to computer and cloud resources and also vast datasets from the Flipkart platform to help train their models. For the company, it will get to keep a bulk of the Intellectual Property (IP) that is produced through the partnership.
Datar added that the technologies jointly developed by Flipkart and IIT Patna could also help to build translation products for Indic languages that can later be externalised, meaning the company could sell translation-as-a-service to other firms looking to tap non-English speaking customers in the country.
Leave a Reply