Multilingual TinyStories: A Synthetic Combinatorial Corpus of Indic Children's Stories for Training Small Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed conversational AI, yet high-quality multilingual code-mixed dialogue resources remain scarce, particularly for Indic languages where speakers naturally alternate between English and their native language in both native-script and Romanized forms. We present IndicTalk, one of the largest multilingual Indic code-mixed conversational corpora, comprising over 13,28,604 event-grounded multi-turn conversations across 18 language varieties covering 9 Indic languages. The corpus is generated through a fully automated pipeline that combines real-world news grounding, persona-conditioned dialogue generation using multilingual LLMs, and automatic quality validation. Extensive linguistic, automatic, and human evaluations demonstrate that IndicTalk produces fluent, coherent, and naturally code-mixed conversations across both script variants. We will release IndicTalk to support the development and evaluation of multilingual conversational AI for underrepresented Indic languages. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LingoIITGN/IndicTalk .

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created a profound digital divide, effectively excluding indigenous languages of the Global South from the AI revolution. The Tharu language, an Indo-Aryan vernacular spoken by approximately 1.7 million people across the Terai belt of Nepal and India, exemplifies this crisis. Despite a rich oral tradition, Tharu suffers from severe data scarcity and linguistic fragmentation, causing state-of-the-art multilingual models to routinely "hallucinate" or default to dominant high-resource neighbors like Hindi and Nepali due to contamination in pre-training corpora. This paper presents Tharu-LLaMA (3B), a specialized instruction-following model designed to address this exclusion. We introduce TharuChat, a novel dataset constructed via a LLM-to-Human bootstrapping pipeline. We utilized prompt-engineered Gemini models, fed with Rana Tharu grammar and folklore, to synthesize training data. Unlike curated gold-standard corpora, TharuChat reflects the noisy, heterogeneous linguistic reality of the region: it is predominantly anchored in Rana Tharu (~70%) while integrating elements of Dangaura and Kochila dialects. We provide a transparent analysis of the dataset's limitations, including dialectal code-mixing and residual Awadhi/Hindi influence. Through a rigorous empirical ablation study, we demonstrate that despite these imperfections, small-scale synthetic data is highly effective, increasing the dataset volume from 25% to 100% results in a linear reduction in perplexity from 6.42 to 2.88. The resulting model serves as a proof-of-concept for the preservation of under-resourced Himalayan languages via generative AI, achievable on consumer-grade hardware.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate narrative content, including children's stories, which play an important role in social and cultural learning. Despite growing interest in AI safety and alignment, most existing evaluations focus primarily on English, leaving the cross-lingual generalization of aligned behavior underexplored. In this work, we introduce BiasedTales-ML, a large-scale parallel corpus of approximately 350,000 children's stories generated across eight typologically and culturally diverse languages using a full-permutation prompting design. We propose a structured generator-extractor pipeline and a multi-dimensional distributional analysis framework to examine how narrative attributes vary across languages, models, and social conditions. Our analysis reveals substantial cross-lingual variability in narrative generation patterns, indicating that distributions observed in English do not always exhibit similar characteristics in other languages, particularly in lower-resource settings. At the narrative level, we identify recurring structural patterns involving character roles, settings, and thematic emphasis, which manifest differently across linguistic contexts. These findings highlight the limitations of English-centric evaluation for characterizing socially grounded narrative generation in multilingual settings. We release the dataset, code, and an interactive visualization tool to support future research on multilingual narrative analysis and evaluation.