Sāmayik: A Benchmark and Dataset for English-Sanskrit Translation
Sanskrit is a low-resource language with a rich heritage. Digitized Sanskrit
corpora reflective of the contemporary usage of Sanskrit, specifically that too
in prose, is heavily under-represented at present. Presently, no such
English-Sanskrit parallel dataset is publicly available. We release a dataset,
S\={a}mayik, of more than 42,000 parallel English-Sanskrit sentences, from four
different corpora that aim to bridge this gap. Moreover, we also release
benchmarks adapted from existing multilingual pretrained models for
Sanskrit-English translation. We include training splits from our contemporary
dataset and the Sanskrit-English parallel sentences from the training split of
Itih\={a}sa, a previously released classical era machine translation dataset
containing Sanskrit.