@ IIT Madras

The AI4Bharat Initiative

Mission statement of the         Initiative

Bring parity in AI technology for Indian languages with English

Make fundamental contributions to state-of-the-art across language technologies - NLP, Speech, Sign language, OCR

Open source all datasets and AI models with permissible licenses

Build a coalition of partners to collect datasets and deploy models

Associate Professor, IIT Madras
PhD, IIT Bombay
Areas - NLP, Deep Learning

 

Mitesh M. Khapra

Pratyush Kumar

Our Team

Vivek Raghavan

Assistant Professor, IIT Madras
PhD, ETH Zürich
Areas - Deep Learning, Systems

 

AI Evangelist, EkStep Foundation
PhD, CMU
Areas - AI, Tech for social good

+ many hard-working students and volunteers

Project Sabdh Setu - Mission

Make educational content accessible in each of the 22 languages that are constitutionally recognised

A bridge to overcome the language divide

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Methodology

Follow the proven modern AI recipe

+

+

Huge amounts of data

Deep neural networks

Lot of compute power

+

Input & translate tools

Methodology

Follow the proven modern AI recipe

+

+

Huge amounts of data

Deep neural networks

Lot of compute power

+

Input & translate tools

What we have done so far

AI model for translating between English and 12 Indic languages

46M parallel sentences mined from the web (3X improvement)

Impact: The translation models (which are shown to be more accurate than commercial APIs) are being used to assist human translators in translating supreme court judgements with a significant increase in efficiency

Funding

What we have done so far

User types using English script

Automatically converted to Maithili script

Impact: Input tools become significantly more efficient for a long list of Indian languages. Impacts all content creation including writing storybooks for children

Deployed to write storybooks at

Funding

Outputs

Open source translation engine between English and all major Indian languages

Open source Android keyboards for 22 languages recognised in the constitution

Goal: Completely free and more accurate than commercial offerings

Outcomes

Direct impact on 20+ crore registered pupils
in schools in rural India

Especially important for digital access in times like COVID-19

Translate all NCERT textbooks from
Class I to XII into all major languages

Alignment with government

Alignment with government

Through EkStep, we are in close contact with the government on the NTM

SabdhSetu

Focus on higher education

Focus on primary education

Tools
AI models

Beyond Education

SabdhSetu

Supreme Court
of India
pilot ongoing

CDAC - evaluating for website translation

Ongoing field test to translate a fiction book

Deployed in
internal tool

Cost

Questions?

SabdhSetu

By One Fourth Labs

SabdhSetu

NSE CSR Pitch

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