Natural Language Processing Resources for Tamil Language: A Systematic Review

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Recently, there have been extensive developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, most studies have focused primarily on English, and relatively little research has been conducted on Tamil. More than 80 million people worldwide use Tamil, one of the national languages of Sri Lanka. It has several unique features that make NLP work more difficult, such as different regional dialects, complex morphemes, and different ways of writing non-standardized words. These challenges are further compounded by the lack of digital content, labeled datasets, and pretrained language models available for Tamil. Although some useful resources exist, they remain limited and fall short of expectations. In this study, we review NLP on Tamil language, identify problems with existing resources, and suggest future developments. Additionally, we highlight the need for collaboration to create better datasets, stronger language tools, and new applications designed to fit the special features of Tamil. This study helps researchers to better understand Tamil and supports the inclusion of low-resource languages in NLP research.