LIMP: Linguistically-Informed Multi-Strategy Prompting for Telugu Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation

Arjungopal Anilkumar, Suryansh Ram Menon, Divagar S, Premjith B


Abstract
Generating contextually coherent multi-turn dialogue in Telugu requires resolving three deeply interacting constraints absent from generic LLM prompting: morphologically encoded social hierarchy (honorific verb conjugations), strict SOV agglutinative syntax, and culturally governed emotional logic formalised in Natyashastra rasa theory (Bharata Muni, 1951). We introduce LIMP (Linguistically-Informed Multi-Strategy Prompting), an inference-time, training-free framework that injects expert linguistic and cultural knowledge into prompt structure, requiring no fine-tuning or labelled data. We empirically evaluate two strategies on 10,000 stratified evaluation instances from the IndicDialogue Telugu corpus (Arnob et al., 2024): LIMP-RAW, a dense constraint prompt, and LIMP-COT, a six-stage analytical scaffold grounded in rasa theory and Telugu morphological grammar. Our primary finding is that LIMP-COT achieves approximately 2× higher morphosyntactic surface fidelity than LIMP-RAW on GEMMA-3-1B-IT (Gemma Team, Google DeepMind, 2025) (1B parameters): Jaccard = 0.0436 vs. 0.0211, Dice = 0.0792 vs. 0.0411 (p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.57), demonstrating that sequential analytical commitment to linguistic constraints produces more form-faithful Telugu than holistic constraint injection. Concurrently, LIMP-RAW achieves near-ceiling semantic fidelity (BERTSCORE F1 = 0.9709), exceeding both LIMP-COT (0.9637) and SARVAM-1 (Sarvam AI, 2024) (2B, Indic-pretrained; 0.9680) on this dimension. This semantic–lexical dissociation—no single configuration dominates across both metric classes—is itself a substantive finding: in agglutinative Telugu, semantic paraphrase fidelity and morphosyntactic surface fidelity are orthogonal evaluation dimensions. On lexical metrics specifically, LIMP-COT with a 1B general-purpose model surpasses SARVAM-1 under matched prompting (Jaccard = 0.0436 vs. 0.0052), suggesting that structured linguistic scaffolding is a stronger lever than parametric scale for form-faithful generation.
Anthology ID:
2026.dravidianlangtech-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
Underline (Virtual)
Editors:
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar Madasamy, Sajeetha Thavareesan, Saranya Rajiakodi, Subalalitha Navaneethakrishnan, Dhivya Chinnappa, Balasubramanian Palani, Malliga Subramanian, Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel, Ratnavel Rajalakshmi
Venues:
DravidianLangTech | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
32–41
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.5/
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Cite (ACL):
Arjungopal Anilkumar, Suryansh Ram Menon, Divagar S, and Premjith B. 2026. LIMP: Linguistically-Informed Multi-Strategy Prompting for Telugu Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 32–41, Underline (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LIMP: Linguistically-Informed Multi-Strategy Prompting for Telugu Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation (Anilkumar et al., DravidianLangTech 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.5.pdf