An Overview of the Shared Task on Machine Translation in Indian Languages (MTIL) – 2017

In recent years, the multilingual content over the internet has grown exponentially together with the evolution of the internet. The usage of multilingual content is excluded from the regional language users because of the language barrier. So, machine translation between languages is the only possible solution to make these contents available for regional language users. Machine translation is the process of translating a text from one language to another. The machine translation system has been investigated well already in English and other European languages. However, it is still a nascent stage for Indian languages. This paper presents an overview of the Machine Translation in Indian Languages shared task conducted on September 7–8, 2017, at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India. This machine translation shared task in Indian languages is mainly focused on the development of English-Tamil, English-Hindi, English-Malayalam and English-Punjabi language pairs. This shared task aims at the following objectives: (a) to examine the state-of-the-art machine translation systems when translating from English to Indian languages; (b) to investigate the challenges faced in translating between English to Indian languages; (c) to create an open-source parallel corpus for Indian languages, which is lacking. Evaluating machine translation output is another challenging task especially for Indian languages. In this shared task, we have evaluated the participant’s outputs with the help of human annotators. As far as we know, this is the first shared task which depends completely on the human evaluation.