Bhasa-Abhijnaanam: Native-script and romanized Language Identification for 22 Indic languages

Yash Madhani, Mitesh M. Khapra, Anoop Kunchukuttan


Abstract
We create publicly available language identification (LID) datasets and models in all 22 Indian languages listed in the Indian constitution in both native-script and romanized text. First, we create Bhasha-Abhijnaanam, a language identification test set for native-script as well as romanized text which spans all 22 Indic languages. We also train IndicLID, a language identifier for all the above-mentioned languages in both native and romanized script. For native-script text, it has better language coverage than existing LIDs and is competitive or better than other LIDs. IndicLID is the first LID for romanized text in Indian languages. Two major challenges for romanized text LID are the lack of training data and low-LID performance when languages are similar. We provide simple and effective solutions to these problems. In general, there has been limited work on romanized text in any language, and our findings are relevant to other languages that need romanized language identification. Our models are publicly available at https://github.com/AI4Bharat/IndicLID under open-source licenses. Our training and test sets are also publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ai4bharat/Bhasha-Abhijnaanam under open-source licenses.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.71
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
816–826
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.71
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.71
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yash Madhani, Mitesh M. Khapra, and Anoop Kunchukuttan. 2023. Bhasa-Abhijnaanam: Native-script and romanized Language Identification for 22 Indic languages. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 816–826, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bhasa-Abhijnaanam: Native-script and romanized Language Identification for 22 Indic languages (Madhani et al., ACL 2023)
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