Leveraging the Cross-Domain & Cross-Linguistic Corpus for Low Resource NMT: A Case Study On Bhili-Hindi-English Parallel Corpus

Pooja Singh, Shashwat Bhardwaj, Vaibhav Sharma, Sandeep Kumar


Abstract
The linguistic diversity of India poses significant machine translation challenges, especially for underrepresented tribal languages like Bhili, which lack high-quality linguistic resources. This paper addresses the gap by introducing Bhili-Hindi-English Parallel Corpus (BHEPC), the first and largest parallel corpus worldwide comprising 110,000 meticulously curated sentences across Bhili, Hindi, and English. The corpus was created with the assistance of expert human translators. BHEPC spans critical domains such as education, administration, and news, establishing a valuable benchmark for research in low resource machine translation. To establish a comprehensive Bhili Machine Translation benchmark, we evaluated a wide range of proprietary and open-source Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) on bidirectional translation tasks between English/Hindi and Bhili. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that the fine-tuned NLLB-200 distilled 600M variant model outperforms others, highlighting the potential of multilingual models in low resource scenarios. Furthermore, we investigated the generative translation capabilities of multilingual LLMs on BHEPC using in-context learning, assessing performance under cross-domain generalization and quantifying distributional divergence. This work bridges a critical resource gap and promotes inclusive natural language processing technologies for low-resource and marginalized languages globally.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.508
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9553–9579
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.508/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.508
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pooja Singh, Shashwat Bhardwaj, Vaibhav Sharma, and Sandeep Kumar. 2025. Leveraging the Cross-Domain & Cross-Linguistic Corpus for Low Resource NMT: A Case Study On Bhili-Hindi-English Parallel Corpus. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 9553–9579, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging the Cross-Domain & Cross-Linguistic Corpus for Low Resource NMT: A Case Study On Bhili-Hindi-English Parallel Corpus (Singh et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.508.pdf
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