
AI, Philosophy And Religion: What Machine Learning Can Tell Us About The Bhagavad Gita
NDTV
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the central Hindu sacred and philosophical texts. Written more than 2,000 years ago, it has been translated into more than 100 languages and has been of interest to western philosophers since the 18th century.
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 are 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. Despite huge variations in vocabulary and sentence structure, we found that the patterns of emotion and meaning were broadly similar in all three.
This research opens a path to the use of AI-based technologies for comparing translations and reviewing sentiments in a wide range of texts.