MuRIL a New Tool form Google To Help Startups, Researchers, Etc. to Understand Indian Languages Better

Google has developed a new language solution called Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL), in order to help computer systems understand Indian languages at scale. The model aims to address concerns around Indian language understanding of computer systems, including all of its complexities like transliteration, spelling variations, mixed languages and other specific use cases that emerge in the Indian context, as well as understanding the sentiment of what the user meant in his/her search. Starting from December 17, Google Search is showing content in Indian languages where appropriate, even if the local language query is typed in English alphabet.

Search engine Google, which has been working on localising the internet to benefit Indians in their native languages and dialects, is now looking to help startups, researchers, and others who might be working on building Indian language technologies (LT). LT is associated with the computational processing of the written or spoken form of a language and aimed at easing its interaction with computer systems and processing a large amount of textual information. For the same reason, Google announced this multilingual model, on Thursday.

As an example, “the sentence Achha hua account bandh nahi hua would previously be interpreted as having a negative meaning, but MuRIL correctly identifies this as a positive statement. Or take the ability to classify a person versus a place: Shirdi ke sai baba would previously be interpreted as a place, which is wrong, but MuRIL correctly interprets it as a person,” the company said in a blog post.

Further, users can now switch between their search results in English and four more Indian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Bangla and Marathi and Hindi. The option to switch language in search results shows at the top of the search page and makes it easier for users to move from English search to their preferred language.

Sanjay Gupta, country head and VP, Google India expressed: "India has added over 100 million new internet users from rural India in the last two years. Every new user coming online is an Indian language user, and we are committed to play a part. Today, we are calling up the industry to take a Bharat-first approach and build an internet that works for every Indian."