Samayik: A Benchmark and Dataset for English-Sanskrit Translation

Ayush Maheshwari, Ashim Gupta, Amrith Krishna, Atul Kumar Singh, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Anil Kumar Gourishetty, Jitin Singla


Abstract
We release Saamayik, a dataset of around 53,000 parallel English-Sanskrit sentences, written in contemporary prose. Sanskrit is a classical language still in sustenance and has a rich documented heritage. However, due to the limited availability of digitized content, it still remains a low-resource language. Existing Sanskrit corpora, whether monolingual or bilingual, have predominantly focused on poetry and offer limited coverage of contemporary written materials. Saamayik is curated from a diverse range of domains, including language instruction material, textual teaching pedagogy, and online tutorials, among others. It stands out as a unique resource that specifically caters to the contemporary usage of Sanskrit, with a primary emphasis on prose writing. Translation models trained on our dataset demonstrate statistically significant improvements when translating out-of-domain contemporary corpora, outperforming models trained on older classical-era poetry datasets. Finally, we also release benchmark models by adapting four multilingual pre-trained models, three of them have not been previously exposed to Sanskrit for translating between English and Sanskrit while one of them is multi-lingual pre-trained translation model including English and Sanskrit. The dataset and source code can be found at https://github.com/ayushbits/saamayik.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1245
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
14298–14304
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1245
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ayush Maheshwari, Ashim Gupta, Amrith Krishna, Atul Kumar Singh, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Anil Kumar Gourishetty, and Jitin Singla. 2024. Samayik: A Benchmark and Dataset for English-Sanskrit Translation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14298–14304, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Samayik: A Benchmark and Dataset for English-Sanskrit Translation (Maheshwari et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1245.pdf