English Kashmiri Machine Translation System related to Tourism Domain

Machine translation, being an emerging area of research has received significant attention from the research community over the years and accordingly a lot of research work in the said area has been carried out so far. This work mainly pertains to international languages such as English, German, and Japanese, etc. The work related to native Indian languages, though very less, mainly pertains to Urdu, Bangla, Punjabi, etc. There are however many Indian languages that have either been least researched or not researched at all and therefore, need to be taken up for research in terms of their NLP resources and subsequent computational efforts to bring them at par with other national & international languages to meet contemporary technological challenges. The Kashmiri language, a most prominent language of the South Asian region is also among these languages. This paper presents a domain specific machine translation system related to the Kashmiri language. Since Kashmiri is a highly resource scare language in terms of digital resources, the data set used for training and testing of the said system has been created from the scratch and mainly pertains to the tourism domain. The work presented is amid the initial attempts towards machine translation of the Kashmiri language and has demonstrated good results along different evaluation metrics