Family helps one another: Dravidian NLP suite for Natural Language Understanding

Abhinav Pm, Priyanka Dasari, Vuppala Nagaraju, Parameswari Krishnamurthy


Abstract
Developing robust Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for morphologically rich Dravidian languages like Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu presents significant challenges due to their agglutinative nature and syntactic complexity. In this work, we present the Dravidian NLP Suite tackling five core tasks: Morphological Analysis (MA), POS Tagging (POS), Named Entity Recognition (NER), Dependency Parsing (DEP), and Coreference Resolution (CR), trained for monolingual models and multilingual models. To facilitate this, we present the Dravida dataset, meticulously annotated multilingual corpus for these tasks across all four languages. Our experiments demonstrate that a multilingual model, which utilizes shared linguistic features and cross-lingual patterns inherent to the Dravidian family, consistently outperforms its monolingual counterparts across all tasks. These findings suggest that multilingual learning is an effective approach for enhancing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities, particularly for languages belonging to the same family. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly address all these core tasks on the Dravidian languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.120
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1926–1941
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.120/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhinav Pm, Priyanka Dasari, Vuppala Nagaraju, and Parameswari Krishnamurthy. 2025. Family helps one another: Dravidian NLP suite for Natural Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1926–1941, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Family helps one another: Dravidian NLP suite for Natural Language Understanding (Pm et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.120.pdf