Semantic and sentiment analysis of selected Bhagavad Gita translations using BERT-based language framework

TL;DR

This paper employs BERT-based language models to compare the semantic content and sentiment of various English translations of the Bhagavad Gita, revealing that despite stylistic differences, the core messages remain consistent.

Contribution

It introduces a framework utilizing deep learning for semantic and sentiment analysis to validate and compare different translations of a sacred text.

Findings

Translations vary in style and vocabulary

Semantic similarity remains high across translations

Sentiment analysis shows consistent emotional tone

Abstract

It is well known that translations of songs and poems not only break rhythm and rhyming patterns, but can also result 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 is 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 from western scholars; 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 a 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 present a framework that compares selected translations (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 bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). We provide sentiment and semantic analysis for selected chapters and verses across translations. Our results show that although the style and vocabulary in the respective translations vary widely, the sentiment analysis and semantic similarity shows that the message conveyed are mostly similar.