A Neural Attention-Based Encoder-Decoder Approach for English to Bangla Translation

Machine translation (MT) is the process of translating text from one language to another using bilingual data sets and grammatical rules. Recent works in the field of MT have popularized sequence-to-sequence models leveraging neural attention and deep learning. The success of neural attention models is yet to be construed into a robust framework for automated English-to-Bangla translation due to a lack of a comprehensive dataset that encompasses the diverse vocabulary of the Bangla language. In this study, we have proposed an English-to-Bangla MT system using an encoder-decoder attention model using the CCMatrix corpus. Our method shows that this model can outperform traditional SMT and RBMT models with a Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score of 15.68 despite being constrained by the limited vocabulary of the corpus. We hypothesize that this model can be used successfully for state-of-the-art machine translation with a more diverse and accurate dataset. This work can be extended further to incorporate several newer datasets using transfer learning techniques.