# L3Cube-MahaPOS: A Marathi Part-of-Speech Tagging Dataset and BERT Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24825/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2026.

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

- [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)
- [End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01354/) (2016)
- [L3Cube-MahaCorpus and MahaBERT: Marathi Monolingual Corpus, Marathi BERT Language Models, and Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01159/) (2022)
- [L3CubeMahaSent: A Marathi Tweet-based Sentiment Analysis Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11408/) (2021)
- [L3Cube-MahaNER: A Marathi Named Entity Recognition Dataset and BERT models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06029/) (2022)
- [L3Cube-MahaSocialNER: A Social Media based Marathi NER Dataset and BERT models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00170/) (2023)
- [L3Cube-MahaEmotions: A Marathi Emotion Recognition Dataset with Synthetic Annotations using CoTR prompting and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00863/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a foundational NLP task underpinning machine translation, information extraction, and syntactic parsing. Despite Marathi being spoken by over 83 million people and ranking among the top twenty most spoken languages worldwide, it remains severely under-resourced in annotated corpora and standardised evaluation benchmarks. Marathi presents unique challenges for computational modelling owing to its rich morphology, relatively free word order, lack of capitalisation conventions, and pervasive code-mixing with Hindi and English. We introduce L3Cube-MahaPOS, a gold-standard POS tagging dataset for Marathi comprising 32,354 manually annotated sentences drawn from news text. Annotation was performed entirely manually by a team of Marathi-proficient annotators following a 16-tag Universal Dependencies-aligned scheme. A structured preprocessing pipeline covering Unicode normalisation, Devanagari-aware tokenisation, and noise filtering ensures label consistency across all splits. We benchmark the dataset across six model families spanning HMM, CRF, BiLSTM, BiLSTM+CharCNN, MuRIL, and the Marathi-specific transformer MahaBERT-v2. The best system achieves 88.67% token-level accuracy and a macro-F1 of 81.67% over 15 evaluated tag classes. We release the dataset, annotation guidelines, and trained model checkpoints to foster further research in Marathi NLP.