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](https://aclanthology.org/people/ningyu-zhang/) ,[Derry Wijaya](https://aclanthology.org/people/derry-tanti-wijaya/)
- Venues:
- [AACL](https://aclanthology.org/venues/aacl/) |[IJCNLP](https://aclanthology.org/venues/ijcnlp/)
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 25–32
- Language:
- URL:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-demo.4/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-demo.4/)
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Badal Nyalang. 2026. NE-Agent: Bringing Agentic AI to Northeast India’s Low-Resource Languages . InProceedings 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](https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-demo.4/) (Nyalang, AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
- PDF:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-demo.4.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-demo.4.pdf)