Nagaland University team wins global award for Nagamese AI project

A multidisciplinary research team has bagged the second prize at the AI-Powered Education Global Award 2025–2026 Contest, organised by the ASEM Lifelong Learning Hub, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, for its innovative project titled “Preserving Heritage through Technology: A Scalable NLP Solution for Nagamese Language (NagaLangue.ai)”.
Nagaland University (NU), through its PRO, stated that the award-winning project addresses a critical gap in artificial intelligence by enhancing machine translation for low-resource and underrepresented languages, with a special focus on Nagamese, a widely spoken creole of Northeast India.
The project uses a token-augmented adaptation of the mBART-50 multilingual model, introducing language-specific tokens to significantly improve translation accuracy without requiring costly architectural changes or large-scale retraining.
Experimental results showed substantial performance gains, with Nagamese–English translation achieving a BLEU score improvement from 81.25 to 85.42, alongside up to 40% reduction in accent-induced translation errors compared to leading multilingual models such as Transformer, M2M-100 and NLLB-200.
NU said the solution demonstrated strong potential for scalable deployment in education, digital governance, immigration workflows and multilingual platforms, while contributing to linguistic equity and cultural preservation.
The study was led by Associate Professor Dr. R. Vasanthan and co-authored by researchers from Nagaland University, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, National College (Autonomous) Tiruchirappalli, Central University of Haryana and Central University of Tamil Nadu.
By combining advanced NLP techniques with cultural sensitivity, NU said NagaLangue.ai sets a global benchmark for how AI can be leveraged to preserve linguistic heritage while advancing inclusive and equitable education technologies.