Decoding Bhagavad Gita through machine learning: What AI-based technologies tell us about philosophy, religion

Machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) methods have had immense success with scientific and technical tasks such as predicting how protein molecules fold and recognising faces in a crowd. However, the application of these methods to the humanities is yet to be fully explored. What can AI tell us about philosophy and religion, for example? As a starting point for such an exploration, we used deep learning AI methods to analyse English translations of the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text written originally in Sanskrit. Using a deep learning-based language model called BERT, we studied sentiment (emotions) and semantics (meanings) in the translations.