In this work, two Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems have been developed and evaluated as part of the bidirectional Tamil-Telugu similar languages translation subtask in WMT21. The OpenNMT-py toolkit has been used to create quick prototypes of the systems, following which models have been trained on the training datasets containing the parallel corpus and finally the models have been evaluated on the dev datasets provided as part of the task. Both the systems have been trained on a DGX station with 4 -V100 GPUs. The first NMT system in this work is a Transformer based 6 layer encoder-decoder model, trained for 100000 training steps, whose configuration is similar to the one provided by OpenNMT-py and this is used to create a model for bidirectional translation. The second NMT system contains two unidirectional translation models with the same configuration as the first system, with the addition of utilizing Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) for subword tokenization through the pre-trained MultiBPEmb model. Based on the dev dataset evaluation metrics for both the systems, the first system i.e. the vanilla Transformer model has been submitted as the Primary system. Since there were no improvements in the metrics during training of the second system with BPE, it has been submitted as a contrastive system.

This paper presents an overview of the shared task on machine translation of Dravidian languages. We presented the shared task results at the EACL 2021 workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages. This paper describes the datasets used, the methodology used for the evaluation of participants, and the experiments’ overall results. As a part of this shared task, we organized four sub-tasks corresponding to machine translation of the following language pairs: English to Tamil, English to Malayalam, English to Telugu and Tamil to Telugu which are available at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/27650. We provided the participants with training and development datasets to perform experiments, and the results were evaluated on unseen test data. In total, 46 research groups participated in the shared task and 7 experimental runs were submitted for evaluation. We used BLEU scores for assessment of the translations.