{"id":13,"identifier":"LOR-00013","url":"https://lifeofresearch.com/articles/13","title":"Cross-Lingual Hallucination Patterns in Indic Languages: A Typology-Aware Research Agenda for Dravidian and Indo-Aryan Comparison","abstract":"Multilingual hallucination in large language models has begun to receive systematic attention. Recent work has measured\naggregate hallucination rates across 19 to 30 languages (FACTSCORE-multilingual, MFAVA, Poly-FEVER), introduced\nmultilingual benchmarks (HalluVerseM3, BHRAM-IL for some Indo-Aryan languages), and demonstrated that LLMs hallucinate\nmore in low-resource languages than in English. What this growing literature does not yet provide is a typology-aware\ncomparison of how hallucination patterns — not just rates — differ across closely-related languages. The Dravidian languages\n(Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam) and the Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati) of India offer a natural\nexperimental setting: substantial variation in training data quantity, sharply different morphological typology (Dravidian\nagglutination versus Indo-Aryan fusion, presence or absence of grammatical gender), shared script families in some cases, and\npervasive code-mixing with English in real use. This paper makes three claims. First, the question \"how often does the model\nhallucinate in language X\" is the wrong primary question; the more informative question is \"which categories of hallucination\ndominate in language X, and why.\" Second, four hypotheses about Indic-language hallucination patterns can be distinguished\nempirically and have meaningful policy and research implications. Third, the experimental work needed to test these\nhypotheses is small enough that a single research team in India could execute it within a year. We propose a measurement\nframework, a concrete experimental protocol, and a case for why this question is particularly tractable in the Indian research\ncontext.","authors":[{"name":"Pranay Mahendrakar","affiliation":"","orcid":"0009-0003-7224-029X"}],"type":"article","license":"CC-BY-4.0","keywords":[],"publication_date":"2026-04-28","version":1,"views":3,"downloads":6,"created_at":"2026-09-22 17:33:56","doi":"10.5281/zenodo.19854165","source":"Zenodo","source_url":"https://zenodo.org/records/19854165","files":[{"id":13,"name":"CrossLingual_Hallucination_Indic_Mahendrakar.pdf","size":93718,"mime":"application/pdf","downloads":6,"download_url":"https://lifeofresearch.com/articles/13/files/13/CrossLingual_Hallucination_Indic_Mahendrakar.pdf"}]}