Digitizing the Documents and Books for Accessibility With Machine Translation and NLP

Challenge starts: August 15

Develop a machine translation model that automatically translates the given documents written in Bhutan’s local language to English and creates a digital copy by storing it in the cloud. In this 8-week challenge, you will join a collaborative team of 50 AI engineers from all around the world.

 

The idea

In this first-of-its-kind virtual ideathon in collaboration with Druk Holding & Investments (the commercial arm of the Royal Government of Bhutan), Machine Learning and Data Science enthusiasts had the opportunity to submit their ideas to use technology to help tackle climate change, healthcare, energy, and other social good challenges in Bhutan.

The aim of the ideathon was to work on the most impactful idea through the Omdena 8-week challenge to make a change in Bhutan. The author of the winning solution is Akash Phaniteja Nellutla.

 

The problem

In Bhutan, eighteen different languages are spoken and of those only Dzongkha has a native literary tradition. Digitization and translation of Bhutanese literature to English will help in the globalization and preservation of the literature with the flexibility, versatility, and richness of English.

Bhutan’s development has been guided by its philosophy of gross national Happiness and focuses heavily on its economic growth and development. With a program to digitize texts and documents related to cultural heritage and literature, it has the capacity to encourage the development of its digital cultural heritage, creative industries, and IT. 

More than two thousand temples, and monasteries (government and private) – Expected to hold important text, documents, and manuscripts. With a program to digitize texts and documents related to cultural heritage and literature, it has the capacity to encourage the development of its digital cultural heritage, creative industries, and IT.

 

The project goals

“Conserving the past for the future”.

The application of NLP such as machine translation would benefit the tourists to interact with the local people of Bhutan to get more insights into the culture and tradition.

The model can be also expanded to other languages if required.

 

The data

Data provided by the partner will include a list of official documents and old literature.

This challenge will also include data collection.

 

Why join? The uniqueness of Omdena AI Challenges

A collaborative experience you never had in your working life! For the next eight weeks, you will not only build AI solutions to make a real-world impact but also go through an entire data science project lifecycle. This covers problem scoping, data collection, and preparation, as well as modeling for deployment.

And the best part is that you will join a global and collaborative team of changemakers. Omdena AI Challenges are not a competition or hackathon but a real-world project that will take your experience of what is possible through collaboration to a new level.

 

Find more information on how an Omdena project works