---
title: "A Morphological Transducer for the Limbu Language — Singh 2026"
description: "Limbu (Yakthung Pan) is an endangered Kiranti language of Eastern Nepal and Sikkim, written in the… 22 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Avyaya Singh", "Jonathan N. Washington"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the Second workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL2026)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.chipsal-1.4/"
doi: "10.63317/32q7did7b56q"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/singh-2026-morphological-transducer-limbu-language/"
---
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# A Morphological Transducer for the Limbu Language

**Authors:** Avyaya Singh and Jonathan N. Washington · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the Second workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL2026)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/chipsal/) ([workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/chipsal/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [European Language Resources Association (ELRA)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/european-language-resources-association-elra/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.chipsal-1.4/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.chipsal-1.4.pdf) · [DOI 10.63317/32q7did7b56q](https://doi.org/10.63317/32q7did7b56q) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7166568025)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/singh-2026-morphological-transducer-limbu-language/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Limbu (Yakthung Pan) is an endangered Kiranti language of Eastern Nepal and Sikkim, written in the Sirijonga script, and it previously had no morphological analyser. The authors built the first finite-state morphological transducer for it, entirely by hand. They used the lexd formalism for morphotactics, twol for morphophonology, and the Apertium/HFST toolchain for compilation. The work drew on two reference grammars, a Limbu dictionary app, and the only two sizeable digital corpora: the Wycliffe Limbu Bible and the Pangloss field interviews collected by Michailovsky (1977). Parts of the interviews were transliterated by hand into Sirijonga for evaluation.

Key engineering problems included:
- encoding the abugida through context-resolved multicharacter symbols,
- handling discontinuous verbal morphology,
- managing analysis ambiguity, partly addressed with a disambiguator.

With a small lexicon, the transducer reaches about 60% coverage and high precision, but recall is low, mainly because many stems are still missing. The tool is released openly, together with a keyboard and a proof-of-concept Limbu–English MT system. This gives a foundation for NLP, language learning, and revitalisation work.

## Key points
- The resource is released under GPL v3 as `apertium-lif` on GitHub and can also be used through Apertium's web interface.
- The tagset has 125 tags, 11 of which mark basic parts of speech. The lexicon contains roughly 700 stems.
- The gold standard consists of 100 randomly sampled unique tokens (out of about 4k) from the "Paddy Dancing" Pangloss interview. Against it, the transducer scored:
  - precision ≈ 88% (108/122),
  - recall ≈ 32% (108/340),
  - F-score 0.4675.
- Most errors are missing stems or unimplemented patterns, such as polar-question and reduplicated verb forms. A further bug limits recognition to two negation morphemes, although the language allows three.
- Limbu is spoken by about 350k people in Nepal and about 41k in India. Planned future work involves native speakers and transcribing more texts, including the UDHR and printed books.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Avyaya Singh and Jonathan N. Washington. 2026. A Morphological Transducer for the Limbu Language. Proceedings of the Second workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{singh2026morphological,
  title = {{A Morphological Transducer for the Limbu Language}},
  author = {Avyaya Singh and Jonathan N. Washington},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/32q7did7b56q},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/32q7did7b56q}
}
```

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## References

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*Updated 31 October 2026*