Machine Translation Systems for Indian Languages: Review of Modelling Techniques, Challenges, Open Issues and Future Research Directions

With the advancement in computer language technology in a multilingual country like India, numerous linguistics require technology for translation. It aids in research for ancient languages like Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam to be available for society. Devising these languages require natural language processing, and machine translation is one of its essential areas. It plays a significant role in breaking the language barrier and facilitating inter-lingual communication by translating one language to another. As, with the advent of information technology, many documents and web pages are available in local languages. There is a tremendous need to establish proper communication amongst the people belonging to discrete backgrounds and cultures. This paper contributes in two ways: firstly, the review of different modelling techniques is performed. It serves the developers with resources required for modelling different techniques such as corpus, domains, toolkits, techniques, models, features and their evaluation measures. Secondly, a comparison of research work on different Indic language pairs based on their modelling techniques have been performed. It influences the work on Sanskrit language to be minimal despite holding an ancient scientific and comprehensive literature of India. It also contributes to linguistic and technical challenges for processing Sanskrit language, open issues, and future research directions in this field.