Towards santali linguistic inclusion: building the first Santali-to-English translation model using mT5 transformer and data augmentation

Abstract

Around seven million individuals in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal speak Santali, positioning it as nearly the third most commonly used Austroasiatic language. Despite its prominence among the Austroasiatic language family’s Munda subfamily, Santali lacks global recognition. Currently, no translation models exist for the Santali language. This paper aims to remove Santali from the NPL spectrum. We aim to examine the feasibility of building Santali-English translation models based on available Santali corpora. This paper successfully addressed the low-resource problem and, with promising results, examined the possibility of using the Santali language. We think that our study will open the door for further exploration into Santali-English machine translation.