Bengaluru: Online retailer Flipcart has partnered with Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IIT Patna), one of the country’s premier science, engineering and technology institute in its efforts to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to understand and translate user reviews in English to other Indian languages.

The MoU will help create industry focused applied research in the areas of AI, NLP and Machine Learning ML and will enable the students to gain industry experience and the faculty member(s) to work closely with Flipkart on research projects.

“The research is particularly aimed at developing robust machine translation techniques for translating the large amount of user reviews written in English to the Indian vernacular languages,” Asif Ekbal, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said.

The work, he says, will ensure that the translation process should preserve the domain knowledge (e.g. sentiment, emotion, gender traits etc), which is extremely crucial for the translation service providers (TSPs) that make use of machine translation (MT) in production.

Collaboration

“Through this initial collaboration, we expect to come up with at least two high-quality publications…. and create a baseline translation workflow in the product review domains. This academic collaboration is expected to bring real world industry exposure to the students and scholars of IIT Patna, and at the same time will provide an opportunity to the faculty member(s) to work closely with Flipkart on research,” he adds.

As a part of this MoU, IIT Patna will undertake a number of programs such as joint research activities, writing research papers, organising seminars, internship / mentorship opportunities to name a few.

The Flipkart Group which includes group companies Flipkart, Myntra, and PhonePe has a registered customer base of over 250 million, offering over 150 million products across 80+ categories.

Among the companies that have invested in the e-commerce giant are China’s Tencent, eBay and Microsoft.

Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist Flipkart says “The aim behind this collaboration is to create industry-focused applied research which could help reach ecommerce to more consumers and sellers alike. With this MoU, we aim to establish deeper academia collaborations which could help students and the academia to leverage our data and platform knowledge to work on India specific e-commerce challenges, in addition to publishing research papers.”

Flipcart has been partnering with academic institutions for the past five years through some of the leading institutes including Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIT (Kharagpur, Bombay and Kanpur), IIM (Ahmedabad and Kolkata) and a few foreign universities like Carnegie Mellon University and University of California.