Towards the Roof of the World: NLP Progress in Tibetan Languages

Xi Cao, Yijie Li, Yuan Sun, Shiwei Dong, Zeguang Huang, Nuo Qun


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.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-aacl.56
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1088–1119
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.56/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xi Cao, Yijie Li, Yuan Sun, Shiwei Dong, Zeguang Huang, and Nuo Qun. 2026. Towards the Roof of the World: NLP Progress in Tibetan Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026, pages 1088–1119, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards the Roof of the World: NLP Progress in Tibetan Languages (Cao et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.56.pdf