Towards the Roof of the World: NLP Progress in Tibetan Languages
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2610.13398 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Oct 2026]
Title:Towards the Roof of the World: NLP Progress in Tibetan Languages
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Abstract:Tibetan, spoken by some seven million people on and around the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, remains underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP). We present, to our knowledge, the first peer-reviewed systematic bibliometric survey of Tibetan NLP: 140 publications from 2004 to 2026 in the ACL Anthology and DBLP, annotated for venue type, research area, first-affiliation country, and resource release. Output has grown rapidly, with 84% of the publications appearing since 2018, and has expanded bottom-up along the NLP pipeline, from corpora and word segmentation through script, speech, and applications to large language models (LLMs). Researchers based in China first-authored 87% of the publications, which span all 25 represented research areas, whereas work from other countries concentrates on Classical Tibetan. We argue that this full-pipeline paradigm, realized under the compounded constraints of a complex script, dialectal diversity, and geographic remoteness, offers a reference model for other low-resource languages of the Global South. We also identify gaps in dialect coverage, responsible NLP, native and comparable evaluation, cross-community visibility, and resource release (only 29% of the publications release data, code, or models), and recommend open science, shared standards, and community participation for the LLM era.
| Comments: | Camera-Ready Version; Accepted at ACL Findings: AACL-IJCNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.13398 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.13398v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.13398
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Towards the Roof of the World: NLP Progress in Tibetan Languages, by Xi Cao and 5 other authors
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