LEVOS: Leveraging Vocabulary Overlap with Sanskrit to Generate Technical Lexicons in Indian Languages
Karthika N J, Krishnakant Bhatt, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Preethi Jyothi
Abstract
Translating technical terms into lexically similar, low-resource Indian languages remains a challenge due to limited parallel data and the complexity of linguistic structures. We propose a novel use-case of Sanskrit-based segments for linguistically informed translation of such terms, leveraging subword-level similarity and morphological alignment across related languages. Our approach uses character-level segmentation to identify meaningful subword units, facilitating more accurate and context-aware translation. To enable this, we utilize a Character-level Transformer model for Sanskrit Word Segmentation (CharSS), which addresses the complexities of sandhi and morpho-phonemic changes during segmentation. We observe consistent improvements in two experimental settings for technical term translation using Sanskrit-derived segments, averaging 8.46 and 6.79 chrF++ scores, respectively. Further, we conduct a post hoc human evaluation to verify the quality assessment of the translated technical terms using automated metrics. This work has important implications for the education field, especially in creating accessible, high-quality learning materials in Indian languages. By supporting the accurate and linguistically rooted translation of technical content, our approach facilitates inclusivity and aids in bridging the resource gap for learners in low-resource language communities.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.bea-1.20
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Vienna, Austria
- Editors:
- Ekaterina Kochmar, Bashar Alhafni, Marie Bexte, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan
- Venues:
- BEA | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 258–265
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.bea-1.20/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Karthika N J, Krishnakant Bhatt, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, and Preethi Jyothi. 2025. LEVOS: Leveraging Vocabulary Overlap with Sanskrit to Generate Technical Lexicons in Indian Languages. In Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025), pages 258–265, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- LEVOS: Leveraging Vocabulary Overlap with Sanskrit to Generate Technical Lexicons in Indian Languages (N J et al., BEA 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.bea-1.20.pdf