NE-Agent: Bringing Agentic AI to Northeast India’s Low-Resource Languages

Badal Nyalang's NE-Agent, presented at AACL-IJCNLP 2026 in Hengqin, China (pages 25–32), is described as the first publicly available agentic AI system built on indigenous Northeast Indian language infrastructure, covering a region with over 220 indigenous languages. The terminal-based system integrates NE-Stack components — language identification across 11 languages (NE-LID), a LaBSE-based multilingual retrieval model (NE-Embed) fine-tuned for 10 Northeast Indian languages, Khasi-to-English translation via a fine-tuned NLLB, speech transcription across eight languages (NE-ASR), and generation through a locally hosted open-source LLM — with a lightweight LLM-based tool router dispatching queries to retrieval, translation or transcription tools. NE-Agent is open-source, installable via pip install ne-agent, ships with a multilingual corpus spanning four languages, and requires no API keys or cloud infrastructure.

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 https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2026.aacl-demo/ - 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 https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-demo.4/ . In 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 , 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