Abhishek Gautam
Author directory2026
LIPI: Transliterating Hindi the Way People Type It
Abhishek Gautam
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2026)
Abhishek Gautam
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2026)
Romanized Hindi has no standard spelling: the same word may be typed nahi, nahin, or nai, and no formal romanization rule or general-purpose transliteration system captures this typed convention well. Transliteration quality therefore depends as much on which spelling a user would actually type as on phonological plausibility. We present LIPI, a compact, encoder-only Devanagari-to-Roman transliteration model (~0.5M parameters) that represents each akshara compositionally from its ordered Unicode codepoints, expands it into six learned CTC emission slots, and encodes the frames with a two-layer bidirectional GRU under a connectionist-temporal-classification objective. The model is trained on a usage-ranked lexicon we build only from the training partitions of Dakshina, Xlit-Crowd, and Aksharantar, ranked by an attestation-gated social-usage prior so that a frequent Roman spelling is preferred only when it is also attested as a transliteration of the source word. LIPI is on par with the much larger multilingual IndicXlit baseline on general word transliteration (Aksharantar) and far stronger on naturally typed queries (FIRE 2013: 73.2 vs. 34.8 exact match), roughly doubling both baselines’ word match on Dakshina and IndoNLP sentences while remaining small enough for on-device use. The word-level gains are statistically significant and hold on words unseen in training, and an emission-slot ablation isolates the learned expansion’s contribution. The model, lexicon, and full benchmark results are publicly released at https://github.com/ABHISHEKgauti25/lipi.