A new paper examines how Artificial Intelligence impacts the linguistic and cultural foundations of the Indian subcontinent, highlighting the tension between inclusion and the homogenization of worldviews. It traces the historical development of Natural Language Processing in this region and analyzes the structural challenges posed by complex scripts, rich morphology, and dialectal variation.
The authors discuss the role of Indic foundation models in addressing resource gaps and propose a research direction called 'Culture Sensing'. This approach re-imagines AI based on hermeneutic reasoning to ensure equitable performance across low-resource languages and produce culturally meaningful outputs.
By integrating past work with emerging trends, the paper outlines directions for developing more robust and inclusive Indic foundation models.