# Computational historical linguistics and language diversity in South Asia

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.12524 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12524/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 134 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [MuRIL: Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10730/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12309/) (2020)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15115/) (2021)
- [Cross-Lingual Alignment of Contextual Word Embeddings, with Applications to Zero-shot Dependency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09492/) (2019)
- [Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00914/) (2018)
- [iNLTK: Natural Language Toolkit for Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12534/) (2020)
- [Dependency or Span, End-to-End Uniform Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05280/) (2019)
- [Indic-Transformers: An Analysis of Transformer Language Models for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02323/) (2020)
- [Ab Antiquo: Neural Proto-language Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02477/) (2019)
- [Endangered Languages are not Low-Resourced!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09567/) (2021)
- [Please Mind the Root: Decoding Arborescences for Dependency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02550/) (2020)
- [A probabilistic assessment of the Indo-Aryan Inner-Outer Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01957/) (2019)
- [For the Purpose of Curry: A UD Treebank for Ashokan Prakrit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12783/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinship](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05049/) (2022)
- [Bhaasha, Bhasa, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia -- Current Stage and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11570/) (2025)
- [Domain-adaptative Continual Learning for Low-resource Tasks: Evaluation on Nepali](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13860/) (2024)
- [Prompt Learning to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting in Cross-lingual Transfer for Open-domain Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07393/) (2023)
- [Jambu: A historical linguistic database for South Asian languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02514/) (2023)
- [When Words Don't Mean What They Say: Figurative Understanding in Bengali Idioms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12921/) (2026)
- [IruMozhi: Automatically classifying diglossia in Tamil](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07804/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Math Education in Low-Resource Languages: A Study in Sinhala and Tamil](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14517/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

South Asia is home to a plethora of languages, many of which severely lack access to new language technologies. This linguistic diversity also results in a research environment conducive to the study of comparative, contact, and historical linguistics -- fields which necessitate the gathering of extensive data from many languages. We claim that data scatteredness (rather than scarcity) is the primary obstacle in the development of South Asian language technology, and suggest that the study of language history is uniquely aligned with surmounting this obstacle. We review recent developments in and at the intersection of South Asian NLP and historical-comparative linguistics, describing our and others' current efforts in this area. We also offer new strategies towards breaking the data barrier.