Marathi Language: From Speech to Sentiment Analysis

Discovering the Marathi Language: From Speech to Sentiment Analysis

The Marathi language, spoken primarily in Maharashtra in western India, boasts a vibrant history and cultural heritage. With over 83 million speakers globally—making it the third most widely spoken language in India and the 15th most popular globally—Marathi continues to attract the interest of scholars and technologists alike. Let's delve into this fascinating language, exploring its evolution in the realm of modern linguistics, from its roots in speech recognition to its applications in natural language processing.

The Art of Communication: Marathi Speech Recognition

As early as the 21st century, researchers recognized the need for Marathi speech recognition systems to better connect its vast population with technology. Despite regional variations within the language and its complex vocalizations, Marathi holds strong potential among the Indian languages, offering many opportunities for technological advancements.

Overcoming Barriers: NLP Resources, Tools, and Challenges

Extensive efforts in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have concentrated on western languages, whereas those of the Indian subcontinent remain relatively underdeveloped. Marathi faces several challenges due to insufficient linguistic resources, complex linguistic features, and the coexistence of local dialects. The evolution of NLP for Marathi involves three primary concerns: morphological characterization of the language, generation of suitable corpora, and creation of appropriate tools and techniques.

The Importance of Sentiment Analysis for Social Insight

In today's world dominated by online discourse, understanding emotions and collective attitudes expressed through languages like Marathi assumes critical importance. Recent works employ advanced techniques, including machine learning algorithms, to interpret both textual and visual input, striving to overcome limitations imposed by scanty training datasets. Notably, MarahEmoSen proposes an emotion-aware multimodal approach to Marathi sentiment analysis specifically tailored for social media, drawing insights from tweets, images, and videos shared on social networking sites.

The Continued Challenge: Marathi Linguistics Today

Despite progress, significant gaps persist in Marathi NLP, requiring the ongoing collaboration of academia and industry to sustain momentum in research and application development. As the demand for indigenous language capabilities rises, innovators must continue to push boundaries to make scientific advances accessible to broad audiences and contribute to bridging digital divides across communities that speak Marathi.