Indian Languages

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8 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 40

Sep 28, 2026cs.CL

Word Similarity Datasets for Indian Languages: Annotation and Baseline Systems

With the advent of word representations, word similarity tasks are becoming increasing popular as an evaluation metric for the quality of the representations. In this paper, we present manually annotated monolingual word similarity datasets of six Indian languages - Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Gujarati. These languages are most spoken Indian languages worldwide after Hindi and Bengali. For the construction of these datasets, our approach relies on translation and re-annotation of word similarity datasets of English. We also present baseline scores for word representation models using state-of-the-art techniques for Urdu, Telugu and Marathi by evaluating them on newly created word similarity datasets.

Syed S. Akhtar, Arihant Gupta, Avijit Vajpayee +2

International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Indian Languages Hindi Similarity and Metrics Motion-Language Alignment Annotations

Sep 27, 2026cs.CL

BaatCheet: A Multilingual Corpus for Dialogue Translation in Indian Languages

Existing translation models are typically trained on sentence-level and formal text, limiting their ability to capture everyday conversational dialogue phenomena such as informality, speaker interaction, and discourse coherence. Most existing Indic translation resources and evaluation benchmarks focus on sentence-level or formal text, making it difficult to assess translation quality of the dialogue phenomena. In this work, we introduce BaatCheet, a multilingual dialogue corpus named after the Hindi term for conversation or chitchat, containing approximately 49,000 dialogues for dialogue translation across five translation directions. We fine-tune five open-source LLMs across seven training data configurations and find that fine-tuning yields substantial gains over zero- and few-shot baselines. To comprehensively evaluate dialogue translation quality, we employ multiple evaluation strategies, including automatic metrics, LLM-as-judge, and human assessments using an SQM-guided Direct Assessment (DA) Protocol.

Priyanka Dasari, Yuvrajsinh D. Bodana, Vandan Mujadia +3

Language Technologies Research Centre, IIIT Hyderabad, India

Translation Quality Multilingual Benchmark Indian Languages Text Corpora Discourse Coherence

Sep 24, 2026cs.CL

Benchmarking and Domain Adaptation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Adolescent Health Communication in Ghanaian Languages

This paper presents an end-to-end study of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for adolescent health communication in three Ghanaian languages (Twi, Dagbani, and Ewe). The work proceeds in three connected stages; First, we benchmark five ASR systems (three language-specific Wav2Vec2 models and two multimodal LLMs, Gemma 3n and Gemma 4) on a general-domain Bible corpus and a Youth Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) Domain ASR dataset, using Character and Word Error Rate (CER, WER). Second, guided by the benchmark, we perform supervised domain adaptation: although Gemma 4 was the strongest zero-shot candidate, fine-tuning it proved computationally infeasible, so we pivoted to the compact Qwen3-ASR-0.6B, fine-tuned on a large Ghana Bible corpus (~90k samples) and evaluated strictly on held-out human-collected in-domain audio. Fine-tuning reduced WER on every language, most dramatically for Ewe (WER from 109.3% to 64.8%, a drop of 44.5 pp; CER from 65.1% to 24.9%). Third, we validate the work through KasaHealth, a live voice-first ASRH application deployed in all three languages, complemented by Senti-Check, a technical evaluation harness. KasaHealth was tested by 50 community respondents and achieved a 100% chat-approval rate, a 72% Good-or-Excellent translation rating, and a 92% would-recommend rate, while surfacing the domain gaps that most constrain real-world use. Across all three stages the evidence converges: for these languages the binding constraint is validated in-domain data, not model capability or computation.

Stephen E. Moore, Akwasi Asare, Mich-Seth Owusu +3

Department of Mathematics, University of Cape Coast, Ghana · Ghana Natural Language Processing, Cape Coast, Ghana

Automatic Speech Recognition Domain Adaptation Indian Languages Text Corpora

Sep 23, 2026cs.CL

COILD: An Indic-Centric Parallel Corpus and Benchmark for Machine Translation Across Indian Languages

Machine translation (MT) for Indian languages remains constrained by the limited availability of high-quality, Indic-centric parallel corpora and evaluation benchmarks. Existing multilingual resources are largely constructed from English-pivot content and often fail to capture the linguistic diversity, cultural complexity, and domain-specific characteristics of Indian languages. We present COILD, an Indic-centric parallel corpus comprising over 1.16 million human-translated and human-verified sentence pairs, covering 20 Indian language pairs across the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Austro-Asiatic language families. The corpus is built entirely from original Indian language sources collected from licensed repositories spanning eight domains with direct real-world applicability. Furthermore, we introduce a domain-centric benchmark comprising 2,000 expert-verified sentences to enable consistent multilingual and cross-lingual evaluation across Indian language pairs. To validate the effectiveness of COILD, we fine-tune two representative multilingual neural machine translation models, IndicTrans2-Distilled and NLLB-200. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements across language pairs, domains, automatic evaluation metrics, and human evaluation, highlighting the effectiveness of high-quality Indic-centric supervision. COILD provides a valuable training and evaluation resource for advancing multilingual machine translation and future multilingual language models for Indian languages.

Kshetrimayum Boynao Singh, Nitin Kumar Mishra, Palash Pratim Dutta +22

IIT Patna · IIT Delhi · IIT Guwahati +3

Indian Languages Machine Translation Text Corpora

Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

Vimarsha: Faithful ASR Evaluation for Indian Languages with Demographic Diversity, In-the-Wild Audio and Spelling Variations

Evaluation benchmarks for Indian language automatic speech recognition (ASR) suffer from two systematic biases: optimistic scores from clean, controlled audio conditions, and pessimistic scores from overly rigid transcription standards that penalize valid linguistic variations. We introduce Vimarsha, a 100-hour benchmark spanning all 22 scheduled Indian languages, designed to address both distortions. Vimarsha combines demographically diverse on-field recordings with carefully mined in-the-wild audio selected for acoustic difficulty, alongside a lattice of variations framework that encodes multiple valid transcriptions per utterance. Evaluations of 10 state-of-the-art ASR models reveal substantial shifts in model rankings under realistic conditions, geographic and demographic performance disparities, and systematic failure modes across speaking rates and acoustic environments.

Kaushal Santosh Bhogale, Srija Anand, Sadakopa Ramakrishnan Thothathiri +3

Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India · Sarvam AI, India

Automatic Speech Recognition Evaluation Indian Languages Automatic Speech Recognition Multilingual Benchmark Transcript Diversity

Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

Fewer Words, Not Fewer Tokens: Measuring the Sanskrit Tokenization Penalty per Proposition

Sanskrit fuses case, number, person and tense into word endings and chains clauses into compounds, so it is information-dense per word. Whether that density survives subword tokenization is a separate question, to be asked per unit of meaning rather than per word. On identical FLORES-200 devtest content, Sanskrit costs 1.774-2.187 times the English tokens under deployed tokenizers with vocabularies of 200,019 ids or more, but only 1.325-1.353 times the Hindi tokens. Against a deployed English tokenizer, Sanskrit-trained BPE arms then look cheaper per proposition than English on contemporary prose (0.887). Against a matched English control, the same algorithm and vocabulary trained on the English side of the same corpus, that flip disappears: at 32,000 and 64,000 pieces all 8 matched pairs, each size-matched arm against both a pair-matched and a byte-matched control, sit above 1.0 on prose with 95% intervals excluding it. The gap closes as the vocabulary grows: at 128,000 pieces the BPE pair reads 0.983 in domain while staying above parity out of domain (1.025) and on FLORES (1.116). The ratio factorises into a character-length ratio and a tokens-per-character ratio, the second near 1 throughout: what survives matched tokenization is character-level length, which Sanskrit prose lacks over English in SLP1 (1.028) and Sanskrit verse has (0.596). The robust statement is about deployed practice: on contemporary prose and on FLORES, with the Sanskrit side in SLP1 against the deployed o200k English pivot, Sanskrit costs 1.831-2.899 English tokens per proposition under the tokenizers people actually ship. Code, the results snapshot and every table here are public.

Devansh Sharma

Independent researcher

Byte-Pair Encoding Indian Languages Logic

Sep 8, 2026cs.CL

Dynamics of Meaning: Towards the Evaluation of Diachronic Semantic Change in Sinhala

Tracking semantic change in low-resource languages across extensive historical timelines presents significant challenges due to data scarcity and the limitations of static embedding alignments. This study investigates the diachronic evolution of the Sinhala language from the 13th to the 20th century using a multi-stage computational framework. We first align century-specific Word2Vec and FastText embeddings using Similarity Matrix Based Alignment (SMA) and Orthogonal Procrustes (OP) techniques, finding that OP alignment provides more stable neighbourhood tracking for identifying temporal similarity dips. To move beyond aggregate measures, we introduce a Bidirectional Semantic Impact Pruning approach using contextualised embeddings from a fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B. By applying Leave-One-Out (LOO) diagnostics, we attempt to isolate influential sentences to distinguish between systemic semantic shifts and transient polysemic expansion. Our results show that semantic drift in the fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B is not evenly distributed across all usages. Instead, a significant part of the change is driven by a smaller set of high-impact contextual instances, rather than gradual and uniform change across all occurrences. This work provides a preliminary framework for low-resource Sinhala diachronic analysis, highlighting the trade-offs between model sensitivity and data availability.

Nevidu Jayatilleke, Nisansa de Silva

Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Low-Resource Languages Indian Languages Contextual Embeddings

Sep 3, 2026cs.CL

IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attacks

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in multilingual settings, yet their safety is still evaluated primarily in English. This limits our understanding of how alignment failures manifest in low-resource and culturally diverse languages. We introduce IndicSafeEval, a persuasion-based jailbreak evaluation framework for Indian languages. Our benchmark combines ten safety critical content categories with six human-like persuasive strategies across four different Indian languages, such as Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi, resulting in 7,200 adversarial prompts. We conduct a systematic black-box evaluation of several open-source LLMs to examine how their safety behaviour varies across languages, persuasion strategies, and risk categories. Our analysis shows that the model does not behave equally safely across all languages and prompt styles. Instead, safety performance depends strongly on both the languages used and the way a request is phrased using persuasive cues. We further observe that different risk categories exhibit different levels of vulnerability, with some types of harmful content being significantly more susceptible to persuasion-based jailbreaks than others. These findings reveal important limitations of current safety evaluations, which are largely English-centric, and underscore the need for multilingual and persuasion-aware benchmarking frameworks to more accurately assess real-world LLM safety. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/MonSaikat/IndicSafeEval. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive or harmful.

Saikat Mondal, Mamta, Deeksha Varshney +2

Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Jodhpur, India · King’s College London, London, UK · Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India

Large Language Model Safety Large Language Model Evaluation Jailbreak Attacks Indian Languages

Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

VakyArth: Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in LLMs across Indic Languages

Real-world communication often requires pragmatic reasoning: interpreting meanings implied through context and cultural convention rather than stated literally. Existing pragmatic evaluation remains largely limited to English and high-resource languages, leaving Indic languages unexplored despite their linguistic and cultural diversity. We introduce VakyArth, the first pragmatic benchmark for Indic languages, designed as a diagnostic evaluation covering Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Malayalam. VakyArth evaluates models across five phenomena: deixis, speech acts, implicature, social pragmatics, and coherence; through multiple-choice questions, natural language inference, and translation, with all items authored by native speakers. Across multilingual large language models (LLMs) of varying families and sizes, we find consistent failures on pragmatic meanings rooted in Indic linguistic and cultural conventions. Our analysis shows systematic differences across languages and tasks: MCQ accuracy exceeds NLI accuracy in all model-language combinations, translation performance does not reliably track pragmatic understanding, and Indo-Aryan languages show a translation advantage over Dravidian languages. We further show that automatic translation metrics can miss fluent but pragmatically unfaithful outputs, especially for implicature and deixis.

Usneek Singh, Poorvaja Veera Balaji Kumar, Parth Nanda +4

Georgia Institute of Technology · University of Texas at Austin

Indian Languages Natural Language Inference

Aug 25, 2026cs.CL

Padamitra: Grounded Glossary Generation for Classical Sanskrit

We introduce grounded glossary generation, a structured task requiring models to recover semantically meaningful Sanskrit phrases and produce translation-grounded meanings from a sloka-translation pair, formalizing the traditional patha commentary practice as an evaluable NLP objective. We construct a benchmark of 31,316 sloka-translation-glossary triples from the Valmiki Ramayana and Srimad Bhagavatam, paired with two metrics: Jaccard for phrase recovery and Meaning Faithfulness for semantic consistency. Across zero-shot, few-shot, and instruction fine-tuned variants of Gemma-3n-E4B, Gemma-3-12B, Phi-4, and Qwen3.5-9B, instruction fine-tuning substantially outperforms prompting, while explicit segmentation yields gains. Error analysis identifies over-segmentation of sandhi and samasa compounds as the dominant failure mode, pointing to morphological modeling as the key bottleneck for faithful Sanskrit lexical decomposition.

Manoj Balaji Jagadeeshan, Sai Pragnaan Marala, Pawan Goyal

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Bodhi Indian Languages

Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Initialization Loss: A Systematic Study of Token Embedding Initialization Strategies for LLM Vocabulary Extension

Vocabulary extension is an efficient way to adapt pretrained large language models (LLMs) to new languages, but the initialization of newly added token embeddings can strongly affect continued pre-training (CPT) efficiency. We present a systematic study of more than 20 initialization strategies for Hindi vocabulary extension in Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B. Our comparison spans vocabulary-averaging baselines; external and learned initialization methods, including FOCUS, top-k semantic retrieval, and residual MLP mappings; subword composition; norm calibration; and input-output asymmetry. We find that subword composition methods outperform both vocabulary averaging and external/learned initialization approaches. Within subword composition, asymmetric variants achieve the lowest observed early validation loss and reveal distinct preferences for input and output embedding initialization. The best observed configuration initializes the input embedding matrix with uniform subword averaging and Hindi-specific norm calibration, and the output language modeling head with character-length-weighted subword averaging. Relative to the standard Mean-all baseline, this full initialization pipeline reaches comparable validation loss with over a 6x reduction in CPT steps and exceeds the baseline's 3,500-step MILU-Hindi accuracy after only 500 steps. Finally, we show that initialization loss and initialization bits-per-byte (Init BPB) are unreliable predictors of downstream convergence, whereas lightweight CPT, as few as 50 steps, provides a cost-effective and reliable signal for selecting the best initialization strategy.

Raviraj Joshi, Utkarsh Vaidya, Sanjay Singh Chauhan +1

NVIDIA

Large Language Model Pretraining Token Embeddings Indian Languages Systematic Study

Jul 28, 2026cs.CL

Evaluation of forced alignment of code-mixed speech: the case of Hindi-English

Code-mixed speech poses unique challenges to forced alignment: expanded inventories, orthographic errors, and speaker variation. We evaluate forced alignment of Hindi-English code-mixed speech using the Montreal Forced Aligner. We address 2 problems: (1) free variation involving native vs non-native pairs and (2) phonemic boundary detection for mid-utterance English words. Bootstrapping strategies substantially outperform unmodified lexicons. Acoustic models trained on sentence-level code-mixed data achieve a mean error of 4.15ms, ie. ten times lower than monolingual Hindi (38.18ms) or isolated English (37.58ms) alternatives. Principled lexicon design and code-mixed training data are both essential for reliable alignment of bilingual speech.

Ayushi Pandey, Pamir Gogoi, Kevin Tang

Karya, India · Department of English Language and Linguistics, Institute of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany · Department of Linguistics, University of Florida, United States of America

Grapheme-To-Phoneme Indian Languages

Jul 28, 2026cs.CL

Inspect India Evals: An Open Benchmarking Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models in the Indian Linguistic and Cultural Context

India is a vast nation of over 1.4 billion people, varied by hundreds of diverse and locally specific traditions and cultures and 22 officially recognized languages. Large language models (LLMs) are now being deployed on a massive scale throughout the mainland as well as in remote villages. However, the common benchmarks - MMLU, BIG-Bench, and TruthfulQA are almost exclusively English- and Western-centric. They do not identify those safety, fairness, and accuracy failures unique to the Indian context. That is the gap Inspect India Evals seeks to fill. It is an open-source framework built on top of UK AISI's Inspect AI platform. It has six benchmarks: Multilingual MMLU across sixteen Indian languages, BharatBBQ (our adaptation of BBQ for Indian social bias), a safety evaluation for Digital Public Infrastructure, a multilingual safety test using harmful prompts in Indian languages, a multi-turn jailbreak resistance test, and an Indian cultural knowledge benchmark scored using LLM-as-judge rubrics. In this study, we tested five open-weight models ranging from 8B to 32B parameters. Sarvam-M 24B and Gemma 2 27B came out on top, both scoring 80% on the composite India Fairness Index, with Sarvam-M even beating larger 32B models on Indian cultural knowledge and DPI safety compliance. All models scored 100% refusal on Multilingual Safety, whereas DPI safety varied from 20% to 100%. The framework is public. It's built to work with the UK AISI registry. Anyone can reproduce or extend this work.

Abhishek Kumar Singh, Shrey Nag, Sachita +2

GTBIT¹ · TIET² · IGDTUW³ +2

Indian Languages Hindi Multilingual Safety

Jul 27, 2026cs.CL

The Tokenizer Tax: Quantifying and Explaining the Cross-Lingual Cost of Subword Tokenization for Indian Languages

Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words. Because these tokenizers are trained predominantly on English-centric corpora, they introduce a systematic and often overlooked disadvantage for many non-English languages. In this work, we quantify this tokenizer tax for Indian languages using the FLORES-200 parallel corpus, measuring tokenization fertility across six widely used tokenizers and fourteen languages. Under cl100k_base (used by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4), Indian languages experience an average 8.0x tokenization tax relative to English, reaching 13.0x for Malayalam, reducing the effective context window to as little as 12% of that available to English users for equivalent semantic content. We identify the primary mechanism behind this disparity: failed byte-pair merges that leave text fragmented into single-byte tokens, with merge failure strongly correlating with tokenizer tax (Pearson r = 0.89). We further show that this phenomenon is not an inherent property of Indic scripts but a consequence of tokenizer design. Multilingual tokenizers such as XLM-R and OpenAI's o200k_base reduce the average Indic tokenizer tax by 73%, demonstrating that the disparity is largely remediable. Beyond token statistics, we quantify a practical consequence by showing that, under fixed context budgets, Indian-language documents preserve substantially less original content than equivalent English documents. Finally, we examine the relationship between tokenizer fertility and reading comprehension performance on the Belebele benchmark, finding that the apparent correlation is largely explained by language resource availability rather than tokenizer behavior alone.

Priyansh Srivastava

Sirena Ai India

Subword Tokenization Tokenizer Indian Languages Cross-Lingual Consistency Quantifying

Jul 26, 2026cs.CL

Indic DiarBench: A Multilingual Joint Diarization and ASR Benchmark for Indian Languages

In this work, we introduce Indic DiarBench, a speaker diarization and ASR benchmark dataset spanning all 22 scheduled languages of India. This corpus comprises approximately 108 hours of natural multi-speaker audio from near-field meetings, far-field recordings, and in-the-wild audios. All annotations are human-corrected with time-aligned speaker attributed transcriptions. The dataset captures conversational nuance prevalent in Indian speech, such as English code-mixing, dialectal variation, and frequent speaker overlap. To establish a baseline for joint ASR and diarization capabilities we evaluate leading systems including commercial speech APIs and multimodal large language models. Indic DiarBench is released as an open-access resource to advance inclusive, multilingual speech technology research for Indian languages.

Deovrat Mehendale, Aditya Mehndiratta, Dhruv Rathi +2

Sarvam AI, India · AI4Bharat, IIT Madras, India

Speaker Diarization Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition Indian Languages Automatic Speech Recognition Multilingual Benchmark Conversational Datasets

Jul 25, 2026cs.CL

BHARATI: Morphology-Aware Tokenizers for Classical Indian Languages with Subword Fertility Analysis

Standard subword tokenization algorithms such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and SentencePiece are trained predominantly on modern language corpora and produce inefficient segmentations when applied to classical Indian languages. Sanskrit, Tamil, and other classical Indic languages exhibit agglutinative morphology, productive sandhi (phonological fusion at word boundaries), and domain-specific vocabularies absent from general-purpose training data. This paper presents BHARATI, a set of SentencePiece BPE tokenizers trained on a balanced 781 MB corpus spanning seven languages (English, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam) with native script support for all languages. We describe three successive tokenizer versions: v1 (English and Sanskrit only, with broken byte-fallback for Tamil), v2 (four-language support with byte-level fallback for southern languages), and v3 (full seven-language native subword coverage). Subword fertility analysis demonstrates that v3 averages 2.6 tokens per Indian Knowledge System (IKS) technical term, compared to 5.25 tokens per term with GPT-2's tokenizer and 3.75 tokens with the multilingual SentencePiece baseline, with the largest gains on a set of reserved IKS terms that are represented as single tokens by construction. On a held-out test set of 490 IKS-domain sentences (70 per language across seven languages, released with the measurement script), v3 reduces sequence length by roughly 90% relative to GPT-2 and byte-level encoding (which lack native Indic subwords) and by approximately 25% relative to the mBART-50 multilingual baseline, averaged across the six Indic languages, directly translating to increased effective context length for downstream language models. The tokenizer models (32,000 vocabulary), training scripts, and evaluation benchmarks are released under open licenses.

Poornima Kumaresan, Pavithra Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran +1

Intrinsic Lab, Centre for Sensors, Instrumentation and Cyber-Physical System Engineering (Centre for SeNSE), Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi 110016, India · RSL Quantum, FITT, IIT Delhi, New Delhi 110016, India

Subword Tokenization Indian Languages Byte-Pair Encoding Hindi Low-Resource Languages Text Corpora+1

Jul 25, 2026cs.CL

IndicTalk: A Large-Scale Persona-Based Multilingual Conversational Corpus for Indic Languages

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 .

Sahil Deepak Gawande, Mayank Singh

Lingo Research Group · IIT Gandhinagar

Conversational Datasets Indian Languages Text Corpora Conversational Context Marker

Jul 8, 2026cs.CL

A Word-Level Digital Reader of the Prasthanatrayi with Sankara's Bhasya: Corpus, Method, and an Open, Offline Reading Aid for the Advaita Vedanta Canon

The Prasthanatrayi -- the ten principal Upanisads, the Brahmasutra, and the Bhagavadgita, with Sankara's commentaries (bhasya) -- is the foundational corpus of Advaita Vedanta. Continuous euphonic combination (sandhi), long compounds (samasa), and dense scholastic prose make it hard to read at the word level: where one word ends, and what each word means grammatically, are both obscured. We present an open, fully offline, word-level digital reader of the entire Prasthanatrayi with Sankara's bhasya. Every word -- of both the root text (mula) and the commentary -- is clickable and resolves to a pop-up giving its split (padaccheda), morphological analysis, and gloss. Because every word carries a lemma, the reader also acts as a concordance: a search on a dictionary headword retrieves all of that word's inflected and sandhi-hidden occurrences, and its occurrences inside compounds, across both layers. The resource covers thirteen commentarial units (2,971 verses, sutras, and prose sections; 36,881 analysed word-occurrences of root text) and a global dictionary of 95,587 distinct commentarial surface forms. We describe the corpus, the hybrid pipeline -- a rule-based sandhi splitter over an inflected-form lexicon and attested-corpus look-ups, with LLM-assisted analysis under an adversarial two-pass verification protocol -- and a durable human-review loop whose corrections survive every regeneration. An intrinsic evaluation against independent Sanskrit resources finds high-confidence analyses agree with an authoritative inflectional lexicon on over 99% of attested forms, and a band-blind adjudication confirms that quality degrades predictably across confidence bands, with errors concentrated in the low-confidence tier the review loop targets. The reader is a single self-contained HTML file needing no server or network, offered as a freely redistributable teaching and reading aid.

Tamal Maharaj

Department of Computer Science Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute Belur Math, Howrah, West Bengal, India

Bodhi Indian Languages Text Corpora Morphology

Jul 7, 2026cs.AI

Rethinking Indic AI from a Lens of Cultural Heritage Preservation

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes inroads into different parts of the Indian subcontinent, there is significant interest in studying how AI impacts the linguistic and cultural foundations of this civilization. AI is seen as a ''double-edged sword'' where on the one hand, it can enable access and inclusion for a large population, on the other, it can homogenize worldviews and exclude underrepresented languages and worldviews. In this paper, we try to characterize this problem by addressing the extensive characteristic nature of Indian linguistics and the way they closely connect to cultural practices and worldview. We then perform a longitudinal survey of how Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have evolved in this space, tracing the historical development of Indic NLP, covering key milestones, methodological shifts, and resource creation efforts. In addition, the paper also examines the structural and sociolinguistic characteristics of Indian languages, such as rich morphology, complex scripts and grammar rules, diglossia, and large dialectal variation, and explains how these create unique challenges for building AI foundation models. We then discuss the growing role of Indic foundation models and analyze how these models address these long-standing resource and representation gaps. Finally, we propose a research direction called 'Culture Sensing', which re-imagines AI based on hermeneutic reasoning. Culture Sensing aims to address open problems such as ensuring equitable performance across low-resource languages and producing outputs that are culturally meaningful. By bringing together past work, current techniques, and emerging trends, this paper outlines research directions that can guide the next phase of Indic NLP and contribute to the development of more robust and inclusive Indic foundation models.

Aparna Madva, Sharath Srivatsa, Srinath Srinivasa +1

International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru, India

Indian Languages Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence Systems Cultural Heritage Wireless Foundation Models Lens

Jul 7, 2026cs.CL

From Sinhala to Dhivehi: Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Speech Recognition

Dhivehi, the national language of the Maldives, is currently under-resourced for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and other NLP tasks. This study investigates whether cross-lingual transfer learning from Sinhala, a linguistically related, relatively well-resourced Insular Indo-Aryan language, can improve Dhivehi ASR. We conduct seventeen experiments across five transfer learning paradigms: Dhivehi-only baselines, sequential fine-tuning, multilingual fine-tuning, continual pre-training, and a control using Turkish as an unrelated language. The strongest system, continual pre-training on Sinhala followed by fine-tuning on Dhivehi with KenLM, achieves 12.89% WER and 2.70% CER, outperforming the Dhivehi-only baseline by 13.50% WER and 3.02% CER. However, the adaptation strategy and decoding configuration are equally critical for a successful transfer learning experiment. We conduct seventeen controlled experiments spanning five transfer learning paradigms: Dhivehi-only baselines, sequential fine-tuning, multilingual fine-tuning, continual pre-training, and a control experiment using Turkish as an unrelated language. The strongest system, continual pre-training on Sinhala followed by fine-tuning on Dhivehi with KenLM, achieves 12.89% WER and 2.70% CER, outperforming the Dhivehi-only baseline by 13.50% WER and 3.02% CER. The Turkish control experiment confirms that observed improvements stem from linguistic relatedness; adaptation strategy and decoding configuration are also critical.

Lukmal Ilyas, Nevidu Jayatilleke

School of Computing, Informatics Institute of Technology, Sri Lanka · Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition Cross-Lingual Transfer Indian Languages Automatic Speech Recognition Low-Resource Languages Linguistics+1

Jul 6, 2026cs.CL

SalAngaBhava: A Sinhala Market Dataset for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis has been a primary domain under Natural Language Processing (NLP) from its inception as it plays a vital role in both real-world and research applications. In high-resource languages, this has been extended a step further, and instead of predicting sentiment at the sentence level, models have been developed to detect more fine-grained sentiments at aspect level. However, in order to conduct this fine-grained Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), datasets annotated with aspects and sentiments toward the said aspects is required. Such datasets are lacking for low-resources languages among which, we can count Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan languages used primarily in Sri Lanka. In this work, we introduce, SalAngaBhava, a new Sinhala Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis dataset which contains Sinhala product reviews that are manually labeled with aspect terms and the associated sentiments (positive, negative, neutral). The data was collected from domain-relevant sources such as user-generated reviews and comments, and was annotated following carefully defined guidelines to ensure consistency and quality. The dataset consists of sentences and aspect-sentiment pairs, encompassing a considerable range of aspects from several domains. The analysis confirms that the dataset is well-structured and sufficiently balanced for ABSA research. This dataset can be used as a benchmark and facilitates further studies related to Sinhala natural language processing, and low-resource sentiment analysis tasks.

Lakshani Galwatta, Nisansa de Silva, Sarangi Aththanayake +1

Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. · School of Technologies, Cardiff Metropolitan university, United Kingdom.

Natural Language Datasets Indian Languages Sentiment Low-Resource Languages

Jul 3, 2026cs.CL

Jointly Improving Dialect Identification and ASR in Indian Languages using Multimodal Feature Fusion

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Dialect Identification (DID) are crucial for Indian languages, many of which are low-resource and exhibit significant dialectal differences. Existing methods often optimize ASR or DID individually, resulting in performance trade-offs. In this work, we propose a multimodal framework that jointly improves ASR and DID. Our method employs a Bottleneck Encoder to extract dialectal features from Conformer-based speech representations and a RoBERTa encoder to process ASR-generated CTC embeddings. A gating mechanism merges these features, followed by an attention encoder to refine the representations. The learned embeddings are concatenated with Conformer outputs to enhance ASR features. Evaluated on eight Indian languages with thirty-three dialects, our method achieves an average DID accuracy of 81.63% and average CER and WER of 4.65% and 17.73%, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of our method for joint ASR-DID modeling.

Saurabh Kumar, Amartyaveer, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh

Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition Automatic Speech Recognition Dialects Discrete Speech Representations Indian Languages Multimodal Fusion

Jun 28, 2026cs.CL

Can OCR-VLMs Read Devanagari? A Stress-Test Benchmark and Post-Correction Study

OCR systems, ranging from classical engines to specialised OCR vision-language models (OCR-VLMs) and frontier multimodal LLMs, report strong results on English and Chinese document benchmarks, yet their behaviour on Indic scripts is largely uncharacterised. We benchmark ten systems on Devanagari (Hindi): classical EasyOCR; open VLMs (Qwen2.5-VL-3B, Qwen3-VL-8B, olmOCR-7B); specialised OCR-VLMs (DeepSeek-OCR, Unlimited-OCR); and frontier closed models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, Mistral OCR), across four synthetic degradation conditions and 300 real printed scans. We report four findings. First, on clean rendered text all ten cluster within chrF++ 91 to 98, so synthetic text does not separate them. Second, under degradation the specialised OCR-VLMs are the most fragile: DeepSeek-OCR suffers rare but catastrophic repetition failures (outputs up to 71 the reference length) that wreck its corpus mean even though its median is the best of any system, which is why we report median and catastrophic-rate instead of the mean. Third, on real scans nine of the ten systems collapse (EasyOCR falls from chrF++ 93.6 to 58.3) and the field spreads across a 76-point range, so synthetic renders badly overstate Devanagari quality. Fourth, strong English OCR does not predict Indic OCR: GPT-5.5 drops to chrF++ 58.5 (tying classical EasyOCR) and olmOCR-7B, the model behind olmOCR-Bench, falls to 40.5, while the open Qwen3-VL-8B (75.2, runnable on a single 24 GB GPU) beats GPT-5.5 and approaches Mistral; Gemini and Claude lead at 86.3 and 82.2. An error taxonomy separates surface errors (numerals, punctuation) from structural ones (conjuncts, matras, nukta), and a byte-level (ByT5) post-corrector improves a cheap engine on its own error distribution (chrF++ +1.2 to +1.5) but does not transfer across engines. We release the benchmark, code, and models.

Aditya Pratap Singh

Optical Character Recognition Indian Languages Character Error Rate Recent Vision-Language Models

Jun 25, 2026cs.CL

SamaVaani: Auditing and Debiasing Multilingual Clinical ASR for Indian Languages

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used to document clinical encounters, yet its reliability in multilingual and demographically diverse Indian healthcare context remains largely unknown. In this study, we first conduct the systematic audit of ASR performance on real-world psychiatric interview data spanning Kannada, Hindi and Indian English, comparing eight state-of-the-art models including IndicWhisper, WhisperLargeV3, Sarvam, GoogleS2T, Gemma3n, OmniLingual, Vaani, and Gemini. Our results reveal substantial variability across models and languages, with some systems performing competitively in Indian English but failing in regional speech. We further fine-tune two of the best performing opensource models, i.e., Gemma3n and OmniLingual, using various methods. With this, we uncover systematic performance gaps tied to speaker role and gender, raising concerns about equitable deployment in clinical settings, which are further mitigated by fairness-aware fine-tuning. To this end, we propose SamaVaani, a unified debiasing technique that simultaneously improves ASR performance and improves fairness across demographic groups.

Subham Kumar, Prakrithi Shivaprakash, Abhishek Manoharan +7

IIT, Kharagpur · NIMHANS, Bangalore · LGBRIMH, Tezpur

Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition Automatic Speech Recognition Indian Languages Healthcare Model Auditing

Jun 25, 2026cs.CL

From Vajrayana Tara to Bengali Baul: A Computational Study of Lexical Transmission Across Buddhist, Shakta, and Vaishnava Traditions in Bengal

We present a computational corpus study of vocabulary relationships across eight tradition layers of Bengali and Sanskrit devotional literature spanning the 8th to 19th centuries, encompassing Buddhist Vajrayana, Shakta Tantra, Vaishnava, and Baul traditions. Using a corpus of 75 texts and TF-IDF character n-gram vectorization with cosine similarity analysis, we address the historically argued but previously unquantified claim that Buddhist Vajrayana vocabulary survived the collapse of the Pala monasteries and was absorbed into the Shakta Tantra tradition of Bengal. The central finding is a specificity result: the Gitagovinda (Vaishnava Sanskrit, 12th century) has zero cosine similarity to Shakta Kali texts, while Bridge Tara texts (Buddhist-Shakta transitional, same century, same language) have cosine similarity 0.54 to Shakta Kali. This 8.5-fold contrast between two Sanskrit traditions from the same century demonstrates that the Buddhist-Shakta vocabulary overlap is not a generic property of Sanskrit devotional literature but is specific to the Buddhist-Shakta transmission chain. Three Brihannilatantra Tara texts show Shakta-to-Buddhist vocabulary ratios of 2.0 to 4.0, constituting measurable evidence of lexical transition within that chain. Ramprasad Sen's 18th-century Bengali Kali songs preserve Buddhist vocabulary residue including 56 occurrences of Tara alongside 103 occurrences of Kali. The Vaishnava Bengali tradition contributes a parallel chain to modern Baul vocabulary (similarity 0.29), slightly weaker than the Buddhist Sahajiya chain via Charyapada (0.31). These results provide the first quantitative multi-tradition corroboration of historically argued Buddhist-Shakta syncretism in Bengal.

Joy Bose

Independent Researcher · Bengaluru, India

Bodhi Indian Languages Bangla

Jun 23, 2026cs.CL

A Pāninian Foundation for Indic Language Processing

More than a billion people communicate in Indic languages, yet the natural language processing infrastructure serving them remains fragmented and underdeveloped. The cause is structural: the field organizes its tools and benchmarks around individual languages or small subsets of genealogical language families, building separate analyzers, parsers, and datasets for each language and starting over for the next. This overlooks a deep regularity. Through more than two millennia of convergence around Sanskrit, Indic languages came to share a morphosyntactic architecture formalized in Pānini's grammar, the Astādhyāyī. This cuts across genealogical lines, uniting languages through a common framework. We argue that this Pāninian framework supplies a unifying computational architecture the field has lacked, and that benchmarks grounded explicitly in it would make Indic language systems more accurate, more data-efficient, and more transferable, effectively merging many apparently disparate and sparse Indic language resources into a single high-resource metalanguage bedrock. We propose a four-part benchmark suite to render this shared architecture explicit, measurable, and ready to be leveraged for practical applications. Moreover, we underscore the question it raises for interpretability research: whether neural models trained on these languages come to represent Pānini's categories on their own.

Ritwik Banerjee, Lav R. Varshney

Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, USA · AI Innovation Institute, Stony Brook University · AI Innovation Institute, Stony Brook University, USA +1

Indian Languages Language Pairs Interpretability

Jun 21, 2026cs.AI

Deep Learning-Based Sign Language Recognition from Videos and Cross-Lingual Translation to Indian Vernaculars

Sign language is a primary mode of communication for the global deaf and hard-of-hearing community, yet automated tools that recognize sign gestures from video and translate them into natural language text remain limited, particularly for low-resource Indian languages. We present a two-stage deep learning pipeline that (i) classifies short sign language video clips into English word labels using a fine-tuned VideoMAE video transformer, and (ii) translates the predicted English label into Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali using Meta AI's No Language Left Behind (NLLB-200) multilingual translation model. The classification model is fine-tuned on a 13-class subset of the AI4Bharat Indian Sign Language video corpus from IIT Madras, processing 16-frame clips sampled uniformly from each video at 224 x 224 resolution. Under a small-scale academic setting (13 classes, 197 clips, 80-20 split), the fine-tuned model reaches 99% training accuracy and 78% validation accuracy after 15 epochs. We provide a per-class breakdown via a confusion matrix and classification report, identify the dominant failure modes (confusable adjective pairs such as ugly, deaf, blind, hat, and dress), and describe a Streamlit-based inference demo that takes a user-uploaded video and returns the predicted English label alongside its Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali translations. We discuss the scope, limitations (small label set, isolated-word rather than continuous signing, single-signer style sensitivity, ambiguity of single-word machine translation), and directions for future work, including expanding to sentence-level generation and a larger vocabulary. Code is released to support reproducibility.

Ramesh Nandipalli, Chandranath Adak

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Bihar, India

Sign Language Translation Indian Languages Video-Language Models

Jun 6, 2026cs.CL

AgriGov: A Structured Multilingual Dataset Curation for Indian Government Schemes for Farmers

AgriGov is a curated, trilingual (English-Hindi-Marathi) dataset designed to address the scarcity of domain-grounded multilingual resources for agricultural policies and farmer welfare schemes. Initially, we collected and structured data from 50 government schemes sourced from trusted portals using automated scraping techniques, organizing it into predefined semantic fields (e.g., title, eligibility, application process, documents, exclusions). Translations were performed using a pipeline combining Google Translate API, MarianMT, and human post-editing, resulting in a domain-specific Hindi-Marathi dataset comprising approximately 2100 source segments. To enhance coverage, we augmented this dataset with sentences from the Samanantar corpus, leading to approximately 8,000 sentence-aligned Hindi-Marathi parallel pairs. The dataset now offers robust resources for fine-tuning machine translation models in this domain. AgriGov is designed for applications in domain-adaptive machine translation, question answering, information retrieval, and summarization systems. Its key contribution is a schema-driven, human-corrected multilingual alignment pipeline that ensures domain fidelity, provides provenance, and supports reproducible experiments, enabling retrieval-augmented applications for farmer-facing tools.

Mohsina Bilal, Gopakumar G

Computer Science and Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kozhikode, 673601, Kerala, India.

Natural Language Datasets Indian Languages Motion-Language Alignment Domain-Adapted Diffusion Data-Curation Economies

Jun 4, 2026cs.CL

English-to-Prakrit Machine Translation via Multilingual Transfer Learning

We study English-to-Prakrit machine translation in a low-resource setting where the target language is unsupported by IndicTrans2. We adapt the multilingual model by mapping Prakrit to the Hindi language tag (hin_Deva) without modifying the tokenizer, vocabulary, or architecture. Using a 1,474-pair Maharashtri Prakrit parallel corpus and evaluation on a 20-sample Ardhamagadhi test set, we report corpus BLEU improvements over an untuned baseline. The results indicate that script-compatible language routing can enable feasible transfer to unsupported classical languages, while highlighting limitations due to data scarcity and dialect mismatch. Our code and trained models are released to the public for further exploration https://github.com/D3v1s0m/indictrans2-prakrit-mt.

Om Choksi, Smit Kareliya, Shrikant Malviya +1

Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat

Indian Languages Text Corpora Transfer Learning

May 28, 2026cs.CL

Evaluating Cross-lingual Knowledge Consistency in Code-Mixed vis-a-vis Indian Languages using IndicKLAR

Large language models often exhibit a substantial gap between their performance in English and in lower-resourced languages on equivalent knowledge queries---a cross-lingual consistency issue that remains underexplored for Indian languages and their code-mixed counterparts. To study this gap, we introduce IndicKLAR, an Indic extension of the KLAR-CLC benchmark covering 18 of the 22 scheduled Indian languages. For 11 widely used language pairs, we additionally provide code-mixed variants. Both monolingual and code-mixed inputs verified by native speakers. This three-way alignment enables us to examine how knowledge recall consistency varies across English, code-mixed, and native Indian language inputs. Across nine open-weight models, we find that the accuracy gap between native-language and English inputs can reach

\sim

0.50, while code-mixed inputs substantially reduce this gap, bringing performance within

\sim

0.05 of English without any model-level intervention. Motivated by this finding, we evaluate several prompting strategies that differ in how explicitly language conversion is exposed: a two-stage translate-then-answer setup, a one-stage joint translation-and-answer prompt, and Translate-in-Thought (TinT)---a single-step strategy in which the model internally converts the input and outputs only the final answer. Across the native

\rightarrow

code-mixed

\rightarrow

English performance trajectory, we observe a consistent flip point---the transition from incorrect to correct prediction---between the native and code-mixed settings. Notably, this pattern holds both when the code-mixed representation is explicitly provided as input or when the model is prompted to convert internally using TinT.

Debajyoti Mazumder, Divyansh Pathak, Prashant Kodali +3

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India · Microsoft Corporation · UNSW Sydney, Australia

Cross-Lingual Consistency Indian Languages

May 13, 2026cs.CL

IndicMedDialog: A Parallel Multi-Turn Medical Dialogue Dataset for Accessible Healthcare in Indic Languages

Most existing medical dialogue systems operate in a single-turn question--answering paradigm or rely on template-based datasets, limiting conversational realism and multilingual applicability. We introduce IndicMedDialog, a parallel multi-turn medical dialogue dataset spanning English and nine Indic languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The dataset extends MDDial with LLM-generated synthetic consultations, translated using TranslateGemma, verified by native speakers, and refined through a script-aware post-processing pipeline to correct phonetic, lexical, and character-spacing errors. Building on this dataset, we fine-tune IndicMedLM via parameter-efficient adaptation of a quantized small language model, incorporating optional patient pre-context to personalise multi-turn symptom elicitation. We evaluate against zero-shot multilingual baselines, conduct systematic error analysis across ten languages, and validate clinical plausibility through medical expert evaluation.

Shubham Kumar Nigam, Suparnojit Sarkar, Piyush Patel

University of Birmingham, Dubai, United Arab Emirates · Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India · Madan Mohan Malaviya University of Technology, India

Multilingual Healthcare Q&A Conversational Datasets Indian Languages Multimodal Clinical Data Multilingual Healthcare

May 5, 2026cs.CL

Nsanku: Evaluating Zero-Shot Translation Performance of LLMs for Ghanaian Languages

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive multilingual capabilities for well-resourced languages, yet their performance on low-resource African languages remains poorly understood and largely unevaluated. This paper presents Nsanku, a systematic benchmark that evaluates the zero-shot machine translation performance of 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs across 43 Ghanaian languages paired with English. Evaluation sentences were sourced from the YouVersion Bible platform, providing 300 sentence pairs per language. Two complementary automatic metrics are employed: Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) and Character n-gram F-Score (chrF), alongside an average accuracy score and a cross-language consistency dimension. Nsanku represents the most comprehensive LLM translation evaluation for Ghanaian languages conducted to date. Results show that gemini-2.5-flash achieves the highest overall average score of 26.88 (BLEU: 24.60, chrF: 29.16), followed by claude-sonnet-4-5 at 24.87 (BLEU: 22.46, chrF: 27.28) and gpt-4.1 at 23.20 (BLEU: 21.15, chrF: 25.24). Among open-weight models, kimi-k2-instruct-0905 leads at an average score of 20.87. A critical finding from the consistency analysis is that no model and no language reached the Leaders quadrant of high performance and high consistency simultaneously, indicating that current LLMs are not yet reliably usable for Ghanaian language translation at scale. Siwu achieved the highest per-language average score at 25.73 while Nkonya scored lowest at 11.65. Nsanku establishes a publicly available, community-extensible evaluation infrastructure for African language NLP research.

Stephen E. Moore, Mich-Seth Owusu, Akwasi Asare +13

Department of Mathematics, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana · Ghana Natural Language Processing, Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana · Khaya AI LTD Ghana

African Languages Cross-Lingual Consistency Indian Languages

May 2, 2026cs.CL

SiNFluD: Creating and Evaluating Figurative Language Dataset for Sindhi

In this article, we introduce SiNFluD, a novel benchmark dataset for Sindhi figurative language classification. We first collect raw text from various blogs, social media platforms, and literary sources, and subsequently prepare the corpus for annotation. Two native annotators label the data using the Doccano text annotation tool, achieving an inter-annotator agreement of 0.81. We then establish baseline results using 5-fold and 10-fold cross-validation. Finally, we evaluate mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and XLM-RoBERTa-XL models, along with SetFit for few-shot fine-tuning of sentence transformers. Among these, the pretrained XLM-RoBERTa-XL achieves the best performance.

Wazir Ali, Adeeb Noor, Saifullah Tumrani

Department of Data Science, Quaid-e-Awam University of Engineering, Science and Technology, Nawabshah, Pakistan. · SoloGenAI Pvt. Ltd. · Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. +1

Natural Language Datasets Metaphors Indian Languages Hindi

Apr 29, 2026cs.CL

Naamah: A Large Scale Synthetic Sanskrit NER Corpus via DBpedia Seeding and LLM Generation

The digitisation of classical Sanskrit literature is impeded by a scarcity of annotated resources, particularly for Named Entity Recognition. While recent methodologies utilise generic Large Language Models (LLMs) for data augmentation, these approaches remain prone to error and often lack the reasoning depth required for classical grammar. In this work, we introduce Naamah, a high quality silver standard Sanskrit NER dataset comprising 102,942 sentences. We propose a methodology that combines entity extraction from DBpedia with the generative capabilities of a 24B parameter hybrid reasoning model to create grammatically natural and synthetically diverse training data. We utilize this dataset to benchmark two transformer architectures: the massive multilingual XLM RoBERTa and the parameter efficient IndicBERTv2.

Akhil Rajeev P, Annarao Kulkarni

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Bangalore

Named-Entity Recognition Indian Languages Large Language Model Generation

Apr 23, 2026cs.CL

Preferences of a Voice-First Nation: Large-Scale Pairwise Evaluation and Preference Analysis for TTS in Indian Languages

Crowdsourced pairwise evaluation has emerged as a scalable approach for assessing foundation models. However, applying it to Text to Speech(TTS) introduces high variance due to linguistic diversity and multidimensional nature of speech perception. We present a controlled multidimensional pairwise evaluation framework for multilingual TTS that combines linguistic control with perceptually grounded annotation. Using 5K+ native and code-mixed sentences across 10 Indic languages, we evaluate 7 state-of-the-art TTS systems and collect over 120K pairwise comparisons from over 1900 native raters. In addition to overall preference, raters provide judgments across 6 perceptual dimensions: intelligibility, expressiveness, voice quality, liveliness, noise, and hallucinations. Using Bradley-Terry modeling, we construct a multilingual leaderboard, interpret human preference using SHAP analysis and analyze leaderboard reliability alongside model strengths and trade-offs across perceptual dimensions.

Srija Anand, Ashwin Sankar, Ishvinder Sethi +10

Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India · AI4Bharat, India · Josh Talks, India

Seed-Tts-Eval Benchmark Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition Speaker Linguistics Indian Languages Preference Alignment Learning

Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

BhashaSutra: A Task-Centric Unified Survey of Indian NLP Datasets, Corpora, and Resources

India's linguistic landscape, spanning 22 scheduled languages and hundreds of marginalized dialects, has driven rapid growth in NLP datasets, benchmarks, and pretrained models. However, no dedicated survey consolidates resources developed specifically for Indian languages. Existing reviews either focus on a few high-resource languages or subsume Indian languages within broader multilingual settings, limiting coverage of low-resource and culturally diverse varieties. To address this gap, we present the first unified survey of Indian NLP resources, covering 200+ datasets, 50+ benchmarks, and 100+ models, tools, and systems across text, speech, multimodal, and culturally grounded tasks. We organize resources by linguistic phenomena, domains, and modalities; analyze trends in annotation, evaluation, and model design; and identify persistent challenges such as data sparsity, uneven language coverage, script diversity, and limited cultural and domain generalization. This survey offers a consolidated foundation for equitable, culturally grounded, and scalable NLP research in the Indian linguistic ecosystem.

Raghvendra Kumar, Devankar Raj, Sriparna Saha

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India · Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India

Indian Languages Natural Language Datasets Low-Resource Languages Natural Language Processing Linguistics Text Corpora+2

Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

How Non-Linguistic Is the Indus Sign System? A Synthetic-Baseline Scorecard

Whether the Indus Valley sign system (c. 2600-1900 BCE) encodes spoken language has been debated for decades. This paper introduces a multi-metric discrimination framework that tests the observed Indus corpus against two kinds of computer-generated non-linguistic baseline -- one mimicking a heraldic emblem system, the other an administrative coding system -- each calibrated with Zipfian frequency distributions, positional constraints, and bigram dependencies derived from six attested non-linguistic corpora. The scorecard evaluates four properties central to the Farmer-Sproat-Witzel (2004) critique: text brevity, repeated formulaic phrases, hapax legomenon rate, and positional rigidity. Applying this framework to 1,916 deduplicated inscriptions (584 unique signs, 11,110 tokens) from the ICIT/Yajnadevam digitization, we find that the Indus corpus does not match either baseline cleanly. Across the four metrics examined, the Indus corpus occupies an intermediate position relative to the two baseline families, matching neither cleanly. Neither a heraldic nor an administrative generator can reproduce all four properties at once. We also compare against seven real-world non-linguistic corpora including Sproat's (2014) datasets, finding that no attested non-linguistic system reproduces the full Indus statistical profile either. We replicate key prior results including a Zipf slope of -1.49 and conditional entropy of 3.23 bits. All code and data are publicly available.

Ashish Nair

Independent Researcher

Indian Languages Linguistics Historical Manuscripts Text Corpora Nonverbal Cues Discriminative Models+1

Mar 11, 2026cs.CL

SiDiaC-v.2.0: Sinhala Diachronic Corpus Version 2.0

SiDiaC-v.2.0 is the largest comprehensive Sinhala Diachronic Corpus to date, covering a period from 1800 CE to 1955 CE in terms of publication dates, and a historical span from the 5th to the 20th century CE in terms of written dates. The corpus consists of 229k words across 185 literary works that underwent thorough filtering, preprocessing, and copyright compliance checks, followed by extensive post-processing. Additionally, a subset of 59 documents totalling 65k words was annotated based on their written dates. Texts from the National Library of Sri Lanka were selected from the SiDiaC-v.1.0 non-filtered list, which was digitised using Google Document AI OCR. This was followed by post-processing to correct formatting issues, address code-mixing, include special tokens, and fix malformed tokens. The construction of SiDiaC-v.2.0 was informed by practices from other corpora, such as FarPaHC, SiDiaC-v.1.0, and CCOHA. This was particularly relevant for syntactic annotation and text normalisation strategies, given the shared characteristics of low-resource language status between Faroese and the similar cleaning strategies utilised in CCOHA. This corpus is categorised into two layers based on genres: primary and secondary. The primary categorisation is binary, assigning each book to either Non-Fiction or Fiction. The secondary categorisation is more detailed, grouping texts under specific genres such as Religious, History, Poetry, Language, and Medical. Despite facing challenges due to limited resources, SiDiaC-v.2.0 serves as a comprehensive resource for Sinhala NLP, building upon the work previously done in SiDiaC-v.1.0.

Nevidu Jayatilleke, Nisansa de Silva, Uthpala Nimanthi +3

Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka · Research Department, Informatics Institute of Technology, Sri Lanka

Indian Languages Text Corpora Low-Resource Languages Literature Version

Aug 12, 2025cs.CL

SinLlama -- A Large Language Model for Sinhala

Low-resource languages such as Sinhala are often overlooked by open-source Large Language Models (LLMs). In this research, we extend an existing multilingual LLM (Llama-3-8B) to better serve Sinhala. We enhance the LLM tokenizer with Sinhala specific vocabulary and perform continual pre-training on a cleaned 10 million Sinhala corpus, resulting in the SinLlama model. This is the very first decoder-based open-source LLM with explicit Sinhala support. When SinLlama was instruction fine-tuned for three text classification tasks, it outperformed base and instruct variants of Llama-3-8B by a significant margin.

H. W. K. Aravinda, Rashad Sirajudeen, Samith Karunathilake +3

Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. · School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. · Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research, Chandigarh, India. +1

Indian Languages Low-Resource Languages

May 10, 2024cs.CL

A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmap

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Ghana's 73 living indigenous languages remains deeply fragmented, under-resourced, and heavily skewed toward a single language. We present the first systematic review of the Ghanaian NLP landscape, screening 17,000+ publications across four academic databases to critically synthesize 36 core studies spanning datasets, model architectures, and evaluation paradigms. Our analysis exposes a severe resource imbalance: Twi-centric NLP has grown modestly, driven largely by religious-text alignment and crowdsourcing, while the remaining 70+ languages remain almost entirely unaddressed, and dataset releases, model checkpoints, and evaluation practices remain inconsistent and rarely shared across the field. We translate these findings into a prioritized roadmap targeting Ghana's acute regional constraints, dialectal variation, non-standardized orthographies, and the absence of shared infrastructure, offering a replicable template for systematic review and research prioritization in other low-resource language settings.

Sheriff Issaka, Erick Rosas Gonzalez, Colene Agbo +18

African Languages Lab

Low-Resource Languages Natural Language Processing Indian Languages Systematic Review Motion-Language Alignment Indonesian E-Commerce Reviews+1