BashkirNLP – Turkic & Low‑Resource Languages Research Hub

BashkirNLP is a collaborative research initiative dedicated to advancing natural language processing for Bashkir, Turkic languages, and low‑resource languages in the Ural-Volga region and beyond. We develop state‑of‑the‑art language models, machine translation systems, linguistic resources, and educational tools to empower under‑represented languages in the digital age.

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🎯 Our Mission

• Build open‑source language models for Bashkir and other Turkic varieties (Tatar, Kazakh, Chuvash, etc.).
• Create high‑quality linguistic resources (corpora, lexicons, evaluation benchmarks).
• Advance machine translation between Bashkir, Russian, English, and major Turkic languages.
• Develop educational materials and interactive demos to lower the entry barrier for low‑resource NLP.
• Foster a community of researchers, developers, and native speakers working together on language technology.

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🚀 Interactive Demos

Explore our live Hugging Face Spaces and try out our models directly in your browser:

🔤 Language Models

• BashkirGPT Playground – Generate and analyze Bashkir text with our latest causal LM.
• TurkicBERT Explorer – Masked language modelling for Bashkir, Tatar, and other Turkic languages.
• Multilingual Embeddings – Compare word/sentence vectors across Turkic languages.

🌐 Machine Translation

• Bashkir ↔ Russian Translator – Neural translation between Bashkir and Russian.
• Bashkir ↔ Tatar Translator – Translation demo for closely related Turkic languages.
• Bashkir ↔ English Translator – Experimental translation for low-resource pairs.

📚 Linguistic Tools

• Bashkir Morphological Analyzer – Interactive segmentation and POS tagging (Cyrillic & Latin scripts).
• Named Entity Recognition for Bashkir – Identify persons, locations, organizations.
• Script Converter – Convert between Cyrillic Bashkir and Latin-based orthographies.

📊 Data & Benchmarks

• Bashkir Corpus Explorer – Browse and query our curated text collections.
• Turkic NLP Leaderboard – Compare model performance on Bashkir, Tatar, and other Turkic tasks.
• Annotation Tools – Help us improve datasets with your feedback.

Click on any demo to start experimenting – no installation required!

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🧠 Research Focus Areas

🏞️ Bashkir Language Technologies

• Creation of the first large‑scale pretrained models for Bashkir (Cyrillic script, with Latin adaptation).
• Morphological disambiguation and syntactic parsing for Bashkir (agglutinative morphology).
• Speech recognition and synthesis for Bashkir (coming soon).

📜 Turkic NLP

• Cross‑lingual transfer learning among Bashkir, Tatar, Kazakh, and other Kipchak languages.
• Unified tokenization and subword models for the Turkic language family.
• Machine translation between Turkic languages and major world languages.

📉 Low‑Resource NLP

• Data augmentation and semi‑supervised learning techniques.
• Leveraging multilingual models (e.g., mT5, XLM‑R, Turkmenglish) for under‑represented languages.
• Few‑shot and zero‑shot learning for tasks like NER and sentiment analysis.

🤖 Language Models

• Pretraining from scratch and continued pretraining on Bashkir/Turkic corpora.
• Efficient architectures (ALBERT, DistilBERT) for low‑resource settings.
• Evaluation and bias analysis of Turkic language models.

📖 Linguistic Resources

• Corpora: News, literature, web‑crawled texts, social media (e.g., VK, Telegram).
• Lexicons: Morphological dictionaries, wordnets, sentiment lexicons.
• Benchmarks: Named entity recognition, part‑of‑speech tagging, machine translation test sets.

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📦 Models & Datasets

We release all our models and datasets on Hugging Face Hub under open licenses.

More models and datasets are added regularly. Follow our organization page for updates.

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📚 Educational Resources

We believe in open education and reproducible research. All our tutorials and teaching materials are freely available.

• Interactive Notebooks – Hands‑on tutorials for building low‑resource NLP systems (in Python, using Hugging Face libraries).
• Video Lectures – Recorded talks on Bashkir/Turkic NLP, data collection, and model training.
• Course Materials – Slides, readings, and assignments from our university courses.
• Blog Posts – Deep dives into challenges and solutions for Bashkir and Turkic languages.

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📝 Selected Publications

1. "BashkirBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Bashkir" – LREC 2025 (planned)
2. "Machine Translation for Low-Resource Turkic Languages: Bashkir–Russian Case Study" – WMT 2024
3. "Building a Named Entity Recognition Dataset for Bashkir" – TurkicLang 2024
4. "Multilingual Representations for Kipchak Languages: A Comparative Study" – EMNLP 2023
5. "Bashkir Corpus: Collection, Annotation, and Baseline Experiments" – Dialogue 2023

Full list with links to PDFs available on our Publications Page.

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🤝 Get Involved

We welcome contributions from the community – whether you are a researcher, developer, student, or native speaker.

For Researchers

• Use our models and datasets in your work (and cite us!).
• Collaborate on joint papers and grant proposals.
• Contribute new benchmarks or evaluation tasks.

For Developers

• Integrate our models into your applications.
• Report bugs or suggest improvements via GitHub Issues.
• Submit pull requests to our open‑source repositories.

For Native Speakers & Linguists

• Help us validate translations and annotations.
• Share texts or corpora (with permission) to enrich our data.
• Provide feedback on model outputs to reduce errors.

For Students

• Use our demos and tutorials for learning.
• Participate in our mentorship program or summer schools.
• Start your own research project with our support.

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🌐 Connect With Us

• 🤗 Hugging Face: BashkirNLP – Models, datasets, and spaces.
• 💻 GitHub: BashkirNLP – Source code, development, and issue tracking.
• 📧 Email: contact@bashkirnlp.org – General inquiries and collaboration.
• 📝 Blog: Medium/BashkirNLP – In‑depth articles.

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🔄 Ecosystem Integration

Our work is integrated with the broader Hugging Face ecosystem:

• Models on the Hub with easy‑to‑use pipelines.
• Datasets with streaming and evaluation scripts.
• Spaces for interactive demos and educational tools.
• Gradio apps for user‑friendly interfaces.

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Empowering Bashkir and Turkic languages through open science and community collaboration.