Google Map Expansion in India now gets good transliteration for 10 Indian languages

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Offering improved services, Google Maps has rolled out automatic transliteration into 10 Indian languages which are Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bangla, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu.

Google said nearly 75 percent of India’s population interacts with web services using languages other than English. Over the next five years, that percentage is expected to rise to 90.

It is to note that transliteration is not translation. When a sentence is transliterated, the same words are written in a different script that will enable users to have better search results in their native languages.

Google said that it has built an ensemble of learning models that will transliterate names of Latin script point of interest (POI) areas within the country. People living in the country who are not well versed with English, can use this new automatic transliteration technology that Google has introduced.

Google has updated its Maps platform in India with transliteration support for 10 prominent languages. What is transliteration? It’s a type of conversion that doesn’t necessarily translate one language into another, but instead changes the letters of one language with a similar sounding letter from another

The transliteration of native script used by people did not work on the algorithm (that company has now introduced) and therefore, the search results that popped were not as accurate as they needed to be. According to the company’s blog post, the new addition of learning models has enabled Hindi transliteration to improve by 3.2 times as far as coverage is concerned and 1.8 time quality improvement was seen

Google Map Expansion in India now gets good transliteration for 10 Indian languages

The company noted that the new ensemble of learned models along with various transliteration dictionaries as well as a module for acronyms has significantly increased the quality and coverage for some languages.

In a post on Google India’s blog, Google said nearly 75 percent of India’s population interacts with web services using languages other than English. Over the next five years, that percentage is expected to rise to 90.

Google’s team built applied machine learning to build a model that transliterated Latin scripts for POIs into 10 prominent Indian languages – Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, and Odia.

Google’s main goal was to, “transliterate from a reference Latin script name into the scripts and orthographies native to the above-mentioned languages”.

Google Maps promised to expand its transliteration system in the future with support for more languages and scripts which are used in the region.

Google noted that as with any machine learning-based system, “the resulting automatic transliterations may contain a few errors or infelicities, but the large increase in coverage in these widely spoken languages marks a substantial expansion of the accessibility of information within Google Maps in India.”