NE-Agent: Bringing Agentic AI to Northeast India’s Low-Resource Languages

Badal Nyalang


Abstract
Northeast India is home to over 220 indigenous languages, yet none are served by existing agentic AI systems. NE-Agent addresses this gap: a terminal-based agentic system that integrates the NE-Stack, a suite of purpose-built language AI components for Northeast India, into a unified conversational pipeline that dynamically selects between retrieval, translation, and transcription tools based on the user’s query. The system combines language identification across 11 languages (NE-LID), multilingual dense retrieval (NE-Embed, a LaBSE-based model fine-tuned for 10 Northeast Indian languages), Khasi-to-English translation (fine-tuned NLLB), speech transcription across eight languages (NE-ASR), and generation via a locally-hosted open-source LLM, requiring no API keys or cloud infrastructure. A lightweight LLM-based tool router dispatches each query to the appropriate tool, distinguishing NE-Agent from purely retrieval-augmented systems. NE-Agent is open-source, pip-installable (pip install ne-agent), and ships with a multilingual corpus spanning four languages. To our knowledge, it is the first publicly available agentic system built on indigenous Northeast Indian language AI infrastructure: https://github.com/MWirelabs/ne-agent.
Anthology ID:
2026.aacl-demo.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Ningyu Zhang, Derry Wijaya
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25–32
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-demo.4/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Badal Nyalang. 2026. NE-Agent: Bringing Agentic AI to Northeast India’s Low-Resource Languages. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 25–32, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NE-Agent: Bringing Agentic AI to Northeast India’s Low-Resource Languages (Nyalang, AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-demo.4.pdf