To translate text from english to regional Indian languages, Flipkart has partnered with the IIT Patna to jointly conduct research for Neural Machine Translation. This is being done as the Walmart-owned company makes a big push into tier II and tier III markets.

This machine can be defined as an approach towards translation which utilizes artificial neural networks to predict a sequence of words. Moreover, it will be one of the most cutting-edge techniques to translate text from one language to another. Hence for this, Flipkart has been collaborating with the researchers at IIT Patna to develop this translation machine.

“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.”

Currently, when it comes to regional Indian languages,  solutions for translating Flipkart’s catalogue and other aspects of its website and app are not the best performing one. The company has said that it needs a lot of work to seamlessly cover other regional languages. For now, they have translated its app into Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, and Tamil. 

In the fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural language processing, Flipkart has signed an MoU with IIT Patna to jointly conduct various research. This would also offer opportunities for the students of IIT Patna by providing writing research papers, organising seminars and providing internship and mentorship accordingly. 

“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.

To help train their models, this partnership will tremendously help researchers at IIT Patna to access computers, cloud resources and most importantly the vast datasets from the Flipkart platform. While the company will be keeping a handful of Intellectual Property (IP) which will be produced through this joint venture. 

Furthermore, this joint development of IIT Patna and Flipkart will also aid in building translation products for Indic languages. In future, this can be offered as a translation-as-a-service so as to tap other non-english speaking communities across the country.