Automatic Segmentation of Classical Tibetan Texts into Autochthonous and Allochthonous Regions

Guy Bilitski, Lev Shechter, Sonam Jamtsho, Nir Marciano, Nicola Bajetta, Rebecca Sunden, Omri Drori, Kai Golan Hashiloni, Orr Zwebner, Asaf Shina, Orna Almogi, Dorji Wangchuk, Kfir Bar


Abstract
We introduce a new computational framework for segmenting Classical Tibetan texts into autochthonous and allochthonous regions, distinguishing between indigenous Tibetan compositions and translated materials, primarily from Sanskrit sources. To support this task, we release the first annotated Tibetan corpus for ALLO/AUTO segmentation and evaluate several multilingual encoders, including mBERT and XLM-R, fine-tuned for sequence labeling. Our best model achieves strong alignment with expert annotations, showing that multilingual representations can effectively capture philological boundaries in low-resource settings. This work contributes new resources and methods for computational philology and sheds light on the linguistic markers that trace the intercultural transmission of Buddhist thought in Tibet.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.79
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
1017–1030
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-079
DOI:
10.63317/2iyfjjv9boc6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guy Bilitski, Lev Shechter, Sonam Jamtsho, Nir Marciano, Nicola Bajetta, Rebecca Sunden, Omri Drori, Kai Golan Hashiloni, Orr Zwebner, Asaf Shina, Orna Almogi, Dorji Wangchuk, and Kfir Bar. 2026. Automatic Segmentation of Classical Tibetan Texts into Autochthonous and Allochthonous Regions. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1017–1030, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Segmentation of Classical Tibetan Texts into Autochthonous and Allochthonous Regions (Bilitski et al., LREC 2026)
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