AI, philosophy and religion: what machine learning can tell us about the Bhagavad Gita.

This study paves the way for the application of AI-based tools to compare translations and assess sentiment across a variety of texts. According to Eknath Easwaran, M.K. Gandhi and Purohit Swami's analysis of the quality of English translations of the Bhagavad Gita, machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) approaches have achieved enormous success in scientific and technological tasks such as determining how protein molecules are formed. The use of these methodologies in the humanities, on the other hand, has yet to be substantially explored. But what can AI teach us about philosophy and religion? They used deep learning artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze English versions of the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu scripture initially written in Sanskrit, as a starting point for such research.

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.

It is well known that translations of songs and poems not only breaks rhythm and rhyming patterns, but also results in loss of semantic information. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient Hindu philosophical text originally written in Sanskrit that features a conversation between Lord Krishna and Arjuna prior to the Mahabharata war. The Bhagavad Gita is also one of the key sacred texts in Hinduism and known as the forefront of the Vedic corpus of Hinduism. In the last two centuries, there has been a lot of interest in Hindu philosophy by western scholars and hence the Bhagavad Gita has been translated in a number of languages. However, there is not much work that validates the quality of the English translations. Recent progress of language models powered by deep learning has enabled not only translations but better understanding of language and texts with semantic and sentiment analysis. Our work is motivated by the recent progress of language models powered by deep learning methods. In this paper, we compare selected translations (mostly from Sanskrit to English) of the Bhagavad Gita using semantic and sentiment analyses. We use hand-labelled sentiment dataset for tuning state-of-art deep learning-based language model known as \textit{bidirectional encoder representations from transformers} (BERT). We use novel sentence embedding models to provide semantic analysis for selected chapters and verses across translations. Finally, we use the aforementioned models for sentiment and semantic analyses and provide visualisation of results. Our results show that although the style and vocabulary in the respective Bhagavad Gita translations vary widely, the sentiment analysis and semantic similarity shows that the message conveyed are mostly similar across the translations.