RGS student presents AI Sanskrit-Chinese phonology paper at RegICON 2025
Source: The Sangai Express

Imphal, November 29 2025: In a rare instance of a school student sharing space with university researchers at a mainstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) forum, Royal Global School (RGS) Class XII student Huma Abia Kanta on Thursday presented a full-length technical paper on an artificial intelligence-driven Sanskrit-Chinese phonology model at RegICON 2025 (Regional International Conference on Natural Language Processing), organised by the Department of Information Technology, Gauhati University.

Huma's work was featured in regular sessions alongside faculty and researchers from leading institutions in India and abroad.

Her paper, titled "A Buddhist-Lexicon-Inspired Encoder-Decoder Model with Luong Attention: Seq2seq Reconstruction of Sanskrit Phonology via Tang-Era Siddham-Hanzi Transliteration", proposes a sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder architecture with Luong attention to reconstruct Sanskrit-oriented phonology from Tang-era Chinese Buddhist lexicon entries, using a curated bilingual dataset designed to preserve historical sound correspondences between Siddham-derived forms and Chinese characters, and argues that such attention-based neural models can assist digital philology, cross-linguistic comparison and script-to-script transliteration for scholars working on Sanskrit, Chinese and related classical traditions.

Co-authored with Dr Ankur Pan Saikia of Assam down town University and Dr Utpal Barman of Assam Skill University, the study was placed in technical sessions that also discussed multilingual benchmarks for Indian languages, Assamese coreference resolution, low-resource machine translation and speech technologies for endangered languages of Northeast India.

The conference also featured keynote talks by internationally recognised NLP experts such as Prof Francis Bond and Dr Karma Wangchuk.

Huma expressed gratitude to Royal Global School Chairman Dr AK Pansari, School Director Dr Arup Kumar Mukho-padhaya and Dr Ankur Pan Saikia for their constant support and encouragement.

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