Nagaland research team wins global award for Nagamese AI language project
Dimapur: A multidisciplinary research team has won Second Prize at the AI-Powered Education Global Award 2025–2026 Contest, organised by the ASEM Lifelong Learning Hub at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, for its innovative project titled Preserving Heritage through Technology: A Scalable NLP Solution for the Nagamese Language (NagaLangue.ai).
According to a university release issued on Monday, the award-winning project addresses a key gap in artificial intelligence by improving machine translation for low-resource and underrepresented languages, with a particular focus on Nagamese, a widely spoken creole in Northeast India.
The researchers employed a token-augmented adaptation of the mBART-50 multilingual model, introducing language-specific tokens to significantly enhance translation accuracy. This approach achieves improved performance without requiring costly architectural changes or large-scale retraining.
Experimental results showed marked gains, with Nagamese-English translation BLEU scores improving from 81.25 to 85.42, along with up to a 40% reduction in accent-induced translation errors compared to leading multilingual models such as Transformer, M2M-100 and NLLB-200.
The solution demonstrates strong potential for scalable deployment across education, digital governance, immigration workflows and multilingual platforms, while also contributing to linguistic equity and cultural preservation.
The study was led by R Vasanthan, associate professor at Nagaland University, and co-authored by researchers from Nagaland University, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, National College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli, the Central University of Haryana, and the Central University of Tamil Nadu.
By integrating advanced natural language processing techniques with cultural sensitivity, NagaLangue.ai sets a global benchmark for leveraging AI to preserve linguistic heritage while promoting inclusive and equitable education technologies.