An Interactive System leveraging Automatic Speech Recognition and Machine Translation for learning Hindi as a Second Language

When English speakers are in the early stages of learning Hindi, formulating sentences in Hindi is often attempted by a verbatim translation of English words to corresponding Hindi words. Due to this reason, they are unable to learn Hindi sentences correctly. We have tried to overcome this problem by use of technology for second language learners. The use of Automatic Speech Recognition, and Machine Translation for second language learning, here learning Hindi by English speaker, has been illustrated by taking English speech as input and translating the given English sentences and words into Hindi and then displaying its equivalent construct in Devanagari script. The interactive system under study displays and speaks the same. It has been observed that a second language can be learnt faster by frequently listening to the vocabulary and sentences of the language. Thus the system furnishes the functionality of speaking the sentence in Hindi once it is represented in Devanagari script. The English sentences and words from the grammar tool books are given as input to the system for experimentation. We have observed that the critical problem encountered while doing so is the translation of English to Hindi. Another problem encountered at times is insertion error for letters (only surfaced). The system cannot translate sentences represented using continuous tense and perfect continuous tense correctly. The overall accuracy of the system, otherwise, is approximately 67% which can help the second language learners in the beginning.

I. Introduction

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI), USA has ranked Hindi language in Category-IV out of the five categories because of its significant and cultural differences from English. This is indicative of the fact that difficulty level of learning Hindi for English speakers is 4 on the scale of 5. Both the Hindi and English are from Indo-European family of languages but Hindi is in Indo-Iranian sub-family and it is derived from Sanskrit; and English is in Germanic sub-family. Due to this major difference, the time taken for English speakers to attain speaking level-3 (S3) i.e. General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3), and General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3), is around 44 weeks (i.e. 1100 hours). The British Foreign Office Diplomatic Service Language Centre list Hindi in Class-II, which is again an indication of difficulty level of 4 out of 5.