Neural Machine Translation for English-Tamil

AbstractA huge amount of valuable resources is available on the web in English, which are often translated into local languages to facilitate knowledge sharing among local people who are not much familiar with English. However, translating such content manually is very tedious, costly, and time-consuming process. To this end, machine translation is an efficient approach to translate text without any human involvement. Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the most recent and effective translation technique amongst all existing machine translation systems. In this paper, we apply NMT for English-Tamil language pair. We propose a novel neural machine translation technique using word-embedding along with Byte-Pair-Encoding (BPE) to develop an efficient translation system that overcomes the OOV (Out Of Vocabulary) problem for languages which do not have much translations available online. We use the BLEU score for evaluating the system performance. Experimental results confirm that our proposed MIDAS translator (8.33 BLEU score) outperforms Google translator (3.75 BLEU score).