# IruMozhi: Automatically classifying diglossia in Tamil

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07804 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07804/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Corpus Creation for Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Tamil-English Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00206/) (2020)
- [Processing South Asian Languages Written in the Latin Script: the Dakshina Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01176/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Controllable Style Transfer for Low-Resource Multilingual Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07385/) (2021)
- [A Dataset for Building Code-Mixed Goal Oriented Conversation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05997/) (2018)
- [Computational historical linguistics and language diversity in South Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12524/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Bhaasha, Bhasa, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia -- Current Stage and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11570/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tamil, a Dravidian language of South Asia, is a highly diglossic language with two very different registers in everyday use: Literary Tamil (preferred in writing and formal communication) and Spoken Tamil (confined to speech and informal media). Spoken Tamil is under-supported in modern NLP systems. In this paper, we release IruMozhi, a human-annotated dataset of parallel text in Literary and Spoken Tamil. We train classifiers on the task of identifying which variety a text belongs to. We use these models to gauge the availability of pretraining data in Spoken Tamil, to audit the composition of existing labelled datasets for Tamil, and to encourage future work on the variety.