Bhashini: How AI Is Powering India's Multilingual Digital Transformation

February 7, 2024

Introduction

Bhashini is an AI-based translation tool which is designed to break the barrier between the diverse languages that people speak across India. It uses Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and, most importantly, it is crowdsourced which helps developers to gather data to teach it different languages. It enables people to speak in their own language while talking to speakers of other languages.

Today, it has become essential to have language models that are specific to India's many languages given the country's linguistic diversity. In this context, Bhashini is the ultimate solution; it is specifically made to understand, process, and produce text in a variety of Indian languages, including Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, and more. Its inception was motivated by the aim of bridging the gap between state-of-the-art language models and the complex linguistic fabric that characterizes India. Bhashini combines transformative technology and linguistic diversity by utilizing sophisticated deep learning architectures tailored to the peculiarities of Indian languages. This allows for contextual understanding, sophisticated language processing, and domain adaptability in a variety of industries. In the field of Indian language processing, its multilingualism, contextual understanding, and domain adaptability represent a significant advancement towards inclusivity, accessibility, and cultural relevance. It also establishes a new standard for language models that are customized to local linguistic subtleties and looks forward to a time when technology coexists peacefully with India's rich linguistic diversity.

Understanding Bhashini

Bhashini, which comes from the Sanskrit term ‘bhasha,’ which means ‘language,’ is an advanced Indian Language Model designed to understand, produce, and handle text in different Indian languages. 

Key Features

  1. Multilingual Capability: Many Indian languages, such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, and others, are supported by Bhashini. Its capacity to be multilingual is essential since it allows it to accommodate a variety of language preferences. 
  2. Contextual Understanding: By utilizing sophisticated deep learning architectures, Bhashini is able to understand the subtleties of context in Indian languages, taking into account grammatical structures, idiomatic phrases, and linguistic nuances unique to each language. 
  3. Fine-tuned for Indian Languages: Bhashini, in contrast to general language models, is especially tailored for the peculiarities of Indian languages, including a variety of scripts, phonetic variances, and distinct syntactic rules that are exclusive to each language. 
  4. Domain Adaptability: Due to the model's versatility across several domains—including healthcare, finance, education, and more—it may be tailored to meet business demands and improve language processing in specialized fields.

Technical Architecture

The intricate foundation of Bhashini's technological architecture is based on cutting-edge deep-learning techniques specifically designed for the intricacies of Indian languages. Fundamentally, Bhashini uses transformer-based neural networks, taking cues from well-known designs such as BERT, GPT, or XLNet. Bhashini's design, in contrast to generic models, is carefully tailored and adjusted to fit the nuances of Indian languages, guaranteeing its effectiveness in a variety of linguistic contexts. The training data, a sizable corpus of varied text sources including books, news articles, social media, and numerous digital platforms in several Indian languages, is what makes the model strong. Bhashini's training is based on this large dataset, which helps it understand the subtleties of language usage, idiomatic phrases, grammatical structures, and contextual changes unique to each language.

Bhashini uses specific tokenization and preprocessing methods to manage the variety of scripts and character sets present in Indian languages. These methods enable effective processing and representation inside the model by segmenting the input text into tokens or subword units specific to each language. The training phase is an important step when the model adjusts to the linguistic nuances and subtleties found in various Indian languages. It entails painstaking fine-tuning and optimization. Bhashini's performance and adaptability are further improved by methods like domain-specific fine-tuning and transfer learning, which guarantee its relevance and application in specialized industries. Bhashini's technological architecture combines state-of-the-art deep learning principles with customized data pretreatment and optimization approaches to produce a model that can analyze and generate text across India's heterogeneous linguistic environment with effectiveness. Its domain-specific optimizations, flexibility and methods for fine-tuning highlight its potential as a flexible and essential instrument for thorough language processing in the complex Indian linguistic ecology.

Training Data

Bhashini's effectiveness is credited to its comprehensive training on enormous text data corpora that span a variety of areas, sources, and genres in every Indian language. This corpus ensures a wide and representative range of English usage by including textual data from news stories, books, social media, and other digital sources.

Preprocessing and Tokenization

Because Indian languages are complicated and include a wide variety of scripts and character sets, Bhashini uses specific tokenization and preprocessing methods. By dividing the input text into tokens or subword units unique to each language, these approaches enable efficient processing and representation.

Fine-Tuning and Optimization

To improve its performance across many languages and domains, the model goes through a rigorous process of fine-tuning and optimization. The model is more resilient and adaptive because of techniques like domain-specific fine-tuning and transfer learning.

Applications of Bhashini

The versatility of Bhashini extends to various practical applications:

  1. Language Understanding and Generation: By enabling a variety of NLP applications, Bhashini makes activities like text interpretation, sentiment analysis, language translation, and text production easier in several Indian languages.
  2. Content Creation and Localization: Bhashini is used by companies and content makers to create and localise content across linguistic areas while maintaining language correctness and cultural relevance.
  3. Customer Interaction and Support: Companies may use Bhashini to improve customer service by using chatbots and customer care systems that speak the customers' native tongues.
  4. Education and Accessibility: By offering information in regional languages, Bhashini contributes to improved accessibility and diversity in learning contexts, hence boosting educational resources.

Future Prospects and Challenges

While Bhashini stands as a remarkable advancement in Indian language processing, several challenges and opportunities lie ahead.

Challenges

  1. Data Quality and Quantity: The availability of high-quality and diverse training data across all Indian languages remains a challenge, impacting the model's performance and coverage. 
  2. Resource Intensiveness: Training and maintaining language models like Bhashini require significant computational resources and expertise, posing a barrier to scalability.

Opportunities

  1. Enhanced Language Coverage: Continued efforts in expanding the coverage and quality of training data will further enhance Bhashini's capabilities across Indian languages. 
  2. Research and Innovation: Ongoing research in NLP and deep learning will fuel innovations in language models, paving the way for improved versions of Bhashini with enhanced functionalities.

Conclusion

Finally, Bhashini represents a quantum leap in the direction of recognising and utilising the linguistic variety that exists throughout India. It can become a vital tool for a wide range of applications, including customer service, education, and content development, because of its capacity to understand contextual subtleties, colloquial phrases, and domain-specific variants within each language. It also helps to democratise access to information and services in regional languages.

References

  1. Sarkar, A.K., Basu, T., Roy, R., Basu, J., Tongbram, M., Chanu, Y.J. and Dwivedi, P., 2023. ‘Study of Various End-to-End Keyword Spotting Systems on the Bengali Language Under Low-Resource Condition’. In Speech and Computer: 25th International Conference, SPECOM 2023, Dharwad, India, November 29–December 2, 2023, Proceedings, Part II (Vol. 14339, p. 114). Springer Nature.
  2. Dixit, R., 2023. ‘A Comprehensive Review of Transformer models and Their Implementation in Machine Translation Specifically on Indian Regional Languages.’ Available at SSRN 4449023.
  3. https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2022/aug/doc202282696201.pdf
  4. Pathak, D.P., ‘Chatbot System in Indian Languages: A Survey’.
Latest Blogs
This is a decorative image for: A Complete Guide To Customer Acquisition For Startups
October 18, 2022

A Complete Guide To Customer Acquisition For Startups

Any business is enlivened by its customers. Therefore, a strategy to constantly bring in new clients is an ongoing requirement. In this regard, having a proper customer acquisition strategy can be of great importance.

So, if you are just starting your business, or planning to expand it, read on to learn more about this concept.

The problem with customer acquisition

As an organization, when working in a diverse and competitive market like India, you need to have a well-defined customer acquisition strategy to attain success. However, this is where most startups struggle. Now, you may have a great product or service, but if you are not in the right place targeting the right demographic, you are not likely to get the results you want.

To resolve this, typically, companies invest, but if that is not channelized properly, it will be futile.

So, the best way out of this dilemma is to have a clear customer acquisition strategy in place.

How can you create the ideal customer acquisition strategy for your business?

  • Define what your goals are

You need to define your goals so that you can meet the revenue expectations you have for the current fiscal year. You need to find a value for the metrics –

  • MRR – Monthly recurring revenue, which tells you all the income that can be generated from all your income channels.
  • CLV – Customer lifetime value tells you how much a customer is willing to spend on your business during your mutual relationship duration.  
  • CAC – Customer acquisition costs, which tells how much your organization needs to spend to acquire customers constantly.
  • Churn rate – It tells you the rate at which customers stop doing business.

All these metrics tell you how well you will be able to grow your business and revenue.

  • Identify your ideal customers

You need to understand who your current customers are and who your target customers are. Once you are aware of your customer base, you can focus your energies in that direction and get the maximum sale of your products or services. You can also understand what your customers require through various analytics and markers and address them to leverage your products/services towards them.

  • Choose your channels for customer acquisition

How will you acquire customers who will eventually tell at what scale and at what rate you need to expand your business? You could market and sell your products on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, or invest in paid marketing like Google Ads. You need to develop a unique strategy for each of these channels. 

  • Communicate with your customers

If you know exactly what your customers have in mind, then you will be able to develop your customer strategy with a clear perspective in mind. You can do it through surveys or customer opinion forms, email contact forms, blog posts and social media posts. After that, you just need to measure the analytics, clearly understand the insights, and improve your strategy accordingly.

Combining these strategies with your long-term business plan will bring results. However, there will be challenges on the way, where you need to adapt as per the requirements to make the most of it. At the same time, introducing new technologies like AI and ML can also solve such issues easily. To learn more about the use of AI and ML and how they are transforming businesses, keep referring to the blog section of E2E Networks.

Reference Links

https://www.helpscout.com/customer-acquisition/

https://www.cloudways.com/blog/customer-acquisition-strategy-for-startups/

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-acquisition

This is a decorative image for: Constructing 3D objects through Deep Learning
October 18, 2022

Image-based 3D Object Reconstruction State-of-the-Art and trends in the Deep Learning Era

3D reconstruction is one of the most complex issues of deep learning systems. There have been multiple types of research in this field, and almost everything has been tried on it — computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning, but to no avail. However, that has resulted in CNN or convolutional neural networks foraying into this field, which has yielded some success.

The Main Objective of the 3D Object Reconstruction

Developing this deep learning technology aims to infer the shape of 3D objects from 2D images. So, to conduct the experiment, you need the following:

  • Highly calibrated cameras that take a photograph of the image from various angles.
  • Large training datasets can predict the geometry of the object whose 3D image reconstruction needs to be done. These datasets can be collected from a database of images, or they can be collected and sampled from a video.

By using the apparatus and datasets, you will be able to proceed with the 3D reconstruction from 2D datasets.

State-of-the-art Technology Used by the Datasets for the Reconstruction of 3D Objects

The technology used for this purpose needs to stick to the following parameters:

  • Input

Training with the help of one or multiple RGB images, where the segmentation of the 3D ground truth needs to be done. It could be one image, multiple images or even a video stream.

The testing will also be done on the same parameters, which will also help to create a uniform, cluttered background, or both.

  • Output

The volumetric output will be done in both high and low resolution, and the surface output will be generated through parameterisation, template deformation and point cloud. Moreover, the direct and intermediate outputs will be calculated this way.

  • Network architecture used

The architecture used in training is 3D-VAE-GAN, which has an encoder and a decoder, with TL-Net and conditional GAN. At the same time, the testing architecture is 3D-VAE, which has an encoder and a decoder.

  • Training used

The degree of supervision used in 2D vs 3D supervision, weak supervision along with loss functions have to be included in this system. The training procedure is adversarial training with joint 2D and 3D embeddings. Also, the network architecture is extremely important for the speed and processing quality of the output images.

  • Practical applications and use cases

Volumetric representations and surface representations can do the reconstruction. Powerful computer systems need to be used for reconstruction.

Given below are some of the places where 3D Object Reconstruction Deep Learning Systems are used:

  • 3D reconstruction technology can be used in the Police Department for drawing the faces of criminals whose images have been procured from a crime site where their faces are not completely revealed.
  • It can be used for re-modelling ruins at ancient architectural sites. The rubble or the debris stubs of structures can be used to recreate the entire building structure and get an idea of how it looked in the past.
  • They can be used in plastic surgery where the organs, face, limbs or any other portion of the body has been damaged and needs to be rebuilt.
  • It can be used in airport security, where concealed shapes can be used for guessing whether a person is armed or is carrying explosives or not.
  • It can also help in completing DNA sequences.

So, if you are planning to implement this technology, then you can rent the required infrastructure from E2E Networks and avoid investing in it. And if you plan to learn more about such topics, then keep a tab on the blog section of the website

Reference Links

https://tongtianta.site/paper/68922

https://github.com/natowi/3D-Reconstruction-with-Deep-Learning-Methods

This is a decorative image for: Comprehensive Guide to Deep Q-Learning for Data Science Enthusiasts
October 18, 2022

A Comprehensive Guide To Deep Q-Learning For Data Science Enthusiasts

For all data science enthusiasts who would love to dig deep, we have composed a write-up about Q-Learning specifically for you all. Deep Q-Learning and Reinforcement learning (RL) are extremely popular these days. These two data science methodologies use Python libraries like TensorFlow 2 and openAI’s Gym environment.

So, read on to know more.

What is Deep Q-Learning?

Deep Q-Learning utilizes the principles of Q-learning, but instead of using the Q-table, it uses the neural network. The algorithm of deep Q-Learning uses the states as input and the optimal Q-value of every action possible as the output. The agent gathers and stores all the previous experiences in the memory of the trained tuple in the following order:

State> Next state> Action> Reward

The neural network training stability increases using a random batch of previous data by using the experience replay. Experience replay also means the previous experiences stocking, and the target network uses it for training and calculation of the Q-network and the predicted Q-Value. This neural network uses openAI Gym, which is provided by taxi-v3 environments.

Now, any understanding of Deep Q-Learning   is incomplete without talking about Reinforcement Learning.

What is Reinforcement Learning?

Reinforcement is a subsection of ML. This part of ML is related to the action in which an environmental agent participates in a reward-based system and uses Reinforcement Learning to maximize the rewards. Reinforcement Learning is a different technique from unsupervised learning or supervised learning because it does not require a supervised input/output pair. The number of corrections is also less, so it is a highly efficient technique.

Now, the understanding of reinforcement learning is incomplete without knowing about Markov Decision Process (MDP). MDP is involved with each state that has been presented in the results of the environment, derived from the state previously there. The information which composes both states is gathered and transferred to the decision process. The task of the chosen agent is to maximize the awards. The MDP optimizes the actions and helps construct the optimal policy.

For developing the MDP, you need to follow the Q-Learning Algorithm, which is an extremely important part of data science and machine learning.

What is Q-Learning Algorithm?

The process of Q-Learning is important for understanding the data from scratch. It involves defining the parameters, choosing the actions from the current state and also choosing the actions from the previous state and then developing a Q-table for maximizing the results or output rewards.

The 4 steps that are involved in Q-Learning:

  1. Initializing parameters – The RL (reinforcement learning) model learns the set of actions that the agent requires in the state, environment and time.
  2. Identifying current state – The model stores the prior records for optimal action definition for maximizing the results. For acting in the present state, the state needs to be identified and perform an action combination for it.
  3. Choosing the optimal action set and gaining the relevant experience – A Q-table is generated from the data with a set of specific states and actions, and the weight of this data is calculated for updating the Q-Table to the following step.
  4. Updating Q-table rewards and next state determination – After the relevant experience is gained and agents start getting environmental records. The reward amplitude helps to present the subsequent step.  

In case the Q-table size is huge, then the generation of the model is a time-consuming process. This situation requires Deep Q-learning.

Hopefully, this write-up has provided an outline of Deep Q-Learning and its related concepts. If you wish to learn more about such topics, then keep a tab on the blog section of the E2E Networks website.

Reference Links

https://analyticsindiamag.com/comprehensive-guide-to-deep-q-learning-for-data-science-enthusiasts/

https://medium.com/@jereminuerofficial/a-comprehensive-guide-to-deep-q-learning-8aeed632f52f

This is a decorative image for: GAUDI: A Neural Architect for Immersive 3D Scene Generation
October 13, 2022

GAUDI: A Neural Architect for Immersive 3D Scene Generation

The evolution of artificial intelligence in the past decade has been staggering, and now the focus is shifting towards AI and ML systems to understand and generate 3D spaces. As a result, there has been extensive research on manipulating 3D generative models. In this regard, Apple’s AI and ML scientists have developed GAUDI, a method specifically for this job.

An introduction to GAUDI

The GAUDI 3D immersive technique founders named it after the famous architect Antoni Gaudi. This AI model takes the help of a camera pose decoder, which enables it to guess the possible camera angles of a scene. Hence, the decoder then makes it possible to predict the 3D canvas from almost every angle.

What does GAUDI do?

GAUDI can perform multiple functions –

  • The extensions of these generative models have a tremendous effect on ML and computer vision. Pragmatically, such models are highly useful. They are applied in model-based reinforcement learning and planning world models, SLAM is s, or 3D content creation.
  • Generative modelling for 3D objects has been used for generating scenes using graf, pigan, and gsn, which incorporate a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). The generator codes radiance fields exclusively. Using the 3D space in the scene along with the camera pose generates the 3D image from that point. This point has a density scalar and RGB value for that specific point in 3D space. This can be done from a 2D camera view. It does this by imposing 3D datasets on those 2D shots. It isolates various objects and scenes and combines them to render a new scene altogether.
  • GAUDI also removes GANs pathologies like mode collapse and improved GAN.
  • GAUDI also uses this to train data on a canonical coordinate system. You can compare it by looking at the trajectory of the scenes.

How is GAUDI applied to the content?

The steps of application for GAUDI have been given below:

  • Each trajectory is created, which consists of a sequence of posed images (These images are from a 3D scene) encoded into a latent representation. This representation which has a radiance field or what we refer to as the 3D scene and the camera path is created in a disentangled way. The results are interpreted as free parameters. The problem is optimized by and formulation of a reconstruction objective.
  • This simple training process is then scaled to trajectories, thousands of them creating a large number of views. The model samples the radiance fields totally from the previous distribution that the model has learned.
  • The scenes are thus synthesized by interpolation within the hidden space.
  • The scaling of 3D scenes generates many scenes that contain thousands of images. During training, there is no issue related to canonical orientation or mode collapse.
  • A novel de-noising optimization technique is used to find hidden representations that collaborate in modelling the camera poses and the radiance field to create multiple datasets with state-of-the-art performance in generating 3D scenes by building a setup that uses images and text.

To conclude, GAUDI has more capabilities and can also be used for sampling various images and video datasets. Furthermore, this will make a foray into AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality). With GAUDI in hand, the sky is only the limit in the field of media creation. So, if you enjoy reading about the latest development in the field of AI and ML, then keep a tab on the blog section of the E2E Networks website.

Reference Links

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362323995_GAUDI_A_Neural_Architect_for_Immersive_3D_Scene_Generation

https://www.technology.org/2022/07/31/gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation/ 

https://www.patentlyapple.com/2022/08/apple-has-unveiled-gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation.html

Build on the most powerful infrastructure cloud

A vector illustration of a tech city using latest cloud technologies & infrastructure