@inproceedings{niyogi-etal-2026-paramanu,
    title = "Paramanu: Compact and Competitive Monolingual Language Models for Low-Resource Morphologically Rich {I}ndian Languages",
    author = "Niyogi, Mitodru  and
      Gaussier, Eric  and
      Bhattacharya, Arnab",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1922/",
    pages = "41431--41458",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are expensive to pretrain and often suffer from imbalances across languages and datasets, English-centric bias, tokenizer oversegmentation for morphologically rich low-resource languages, and the curse of multilinguality. We introduce PARAMANU, a family of Indian language-only autoregressive language models trained from scratch on open-source language-specific data for the five most spoken Indian languages: Bangla (Bengali), Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. All models are designed for affordability and are trained on a single GPU with a budget under $1,000, allowing under-resourced researchers to build competitive language models. To address low-resource challenges, we develop morphology-aligned, low-fertility tokenizers, and propose an interpolation-based method for token position indices in RoPE based scaling to train longer sequences efficiently. We also create instruction-tuning datasets in Bangla that are then translated to the other four languages. Despite their small size (108M-367M parameters), Paramanu achieves a strong performance-efficiency tradeoff and outperforms most larger multilingual models up to 8B across all five languages. The models and datasets are available at: https://huggingface.co/collections/mitodru/paramanu.$"
}