Sujeet Kumar

Sebastian Nehrdich, David Allport, Sven Sellmer et al.

While machine translation is regarded as a "solved problem" for many high-resource languages, close analysis quickly reveals that this is not the case for content that shows challenges such as poetic language, philosophical concepts, multi-layered metaphorical expressions, and more. Sanskrit literature is a prime example of this, as it combines a large number of such challenges in addition to inherent linguistic features like sandhi, compounding, and heavy morphology, which further complicate NLP downstream tasks. It spans multiple millennia of text production time as well as a large breadth of different domains, ranging from ritual formulas via epic narratives, philosophical treatises, poetic verses up to scientific material. As of now, there is a strong lack of publicly available resources that cover these different domains and temporal layers of Sanskrit. We therefore introduce Mitrasamgraha, a high-quality Sanskrit-to-English machine translation dataset consisting of 391,548 bitext pairs, more than four times larger than the largest previously available Sanskrit dataset Itih=asa. It covers a time period of more than three millennia and a broad range of historical Sanskrit domains. In contrast to web-crawled datasets, the temporal and domain annotation of this dataset enables fine-grained study of domain and time period effects on MT performance. We also release a validation set consisting of 5,587 and a test set consisting of 5,552 post-corrected bitext pairs. We conduct experiments benchmarking commercial and open models on this dataset and fine-tune NLLB and Gemma models on the dataset, showing significant improvements, while still recognizing significant challenges in the translation of complex compounds, philosophical concepts, and multi-layered metaphors. We also analyze how in-context learning on this dataset impacts the performance of commercial models

Sujeet Kumar, Pretam Ray, Abhinay Beerukuri et al.

Sanskrit, an ancient language with a rich linguistic heritage, presents unique challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) due to its phonemic complexity and the phonetic transformations that occur at word junctures, similar to the connected speech found in natural conversations. Due to these complexities, there has been limited exploration of ASR in Sanskrit, particularly in the context of its poetic verses, which are characterized by intricate prosodic and rhythmic patterns. This gap in research raises the question: How can we develop an effective ASR system for Sanskrit, particularly one that captures the nuanced features of its poetic form? In this study, we introduce Vedavani, the first comprehensive ASR study focused on Sanskrit Vedic poetry. We present a 54-hour Sanskrit ASR dataset, consisting of 30,779 labelled audio samples from the Rig Veda and Atharva Veda. This dataset captures the precise prosodic and rhythmic features that define the language. We also benchmark the dataset on various state-of-the-art multilingual speech models.$^{1}$ Experimentation revealed that IndicWhisper performed the best among the SOTA models.