# ILID: Native Script Language Identification for Indian Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11832/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [MuRIL: Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10730/) (2021)
- [Fast WordPiece Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15524/) (2020)
- [Language ID in the Wild: Unexpected Challenges on the Path to a Thousand-Language Web Text Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14571/) (2020)
- [Aksharantar: Open Indic-language Transliteration datasets and models for the Next Billion Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03018/) (2022)
- [Bhasha-Abhijnaanam: Native-script and romanized Language Identification for 22 Indic languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15814/) (2023)
- [LIMIT: Language Identification, Misidentification, and Translation using Hierarchical Models in 350+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14263/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The language identification task is a crucial fundamental step in NLP. Often it serves as a pre-processing step for widely used NLP applications such as multilingual machine translation, information retrieval, question and answering, and text summarization. The core challenge of language identification lies in distinguishing languages in noisy, short, and code-mixed environments. This becomes even harder in case of diverse Indian languages that exhibit lexical and phonetic similarities, but have distinct differences. Many Indian languages share the same script, making the task even more challenging. Taking all these challenges into account, we develop and release a dataset of 250K sentences consisting of 23 languages including English and all 22 official Indian languages labeled with their language identifiers, where data in most languages are newly created. We also develop and release baseline models using state-of-the-art approaches in machine learning and fine-tuning pre-trained transformer models. Our models outperforms the state-of-the-art pre-trained transformer models for the language identification task. The dataset and the codes are available at https://yashingle-ai.github.io/ILID/ and in Huggingface open source libraries.