Automated Python Translation

Python is one of the most commonly used programming languages in industry and education. Its English keywords and built-in functions/modules allow it to come close to pseudo-code in terms of its readability and ease of writing. However, those who do not speak English may not experience these advantages. In fact, they may even be hindered in their ability to understand Python code, as the English nature of its terms creates an additional layer of overhead. To that end, we introduce the task of automatically translating Python's natural modality (keywords, error types, identifiers, etc.) into other human languages. This presents a unique challenge, considering the abbreviated nature of these forms, as well as potential untranslatability of advanced mathematical/programming concepts across languages. We therefore create an automated pipeline to translate Python into other human languages, comparing strategies using machine translation and large language models. We then use this pipeline to acquire translations from five common Python libraries (pytorch, pandas, tensorflow, numpy, and random) in seven languages, and do a quality test on a subset of these terms in French, Greek, and Bengali. We hope this will provide a clearer path forward towards creating a universal Python, accessible to anyone regardless of nationality or language background.

Script-Agnostic Language Identification

Language identification is used as the first step in many data collection and crawling efforts because it allows us to sort online text into language-specific buckets. However, many modern languages, such as Konkani, Kashmiri, Punjabi etc., are synchronically written in several scripts. Moreover, languages with different writing systems do not share significant lexical, semantic, and syntactic properties in neural representation spaces, which is a disadvantage for closely related languages and low-resource languages, especially those from the Indian Subcontinent. To counter this, we propose learning script-agnostic representations using several different experimental strategies (upscaling, flattening, and script mixing) focusing on four major Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam). We find that word-level script randomization and exposure to a language written in multiple scripts is extremely valuable for downstream script-agnostic language identification, while also maintaining competitive performance on naturally occurring text.