16-Year-Old Guwahati Girl Stuns RegICON 2025 With Peer-Reviewed AI Paper

Two days after a rare and notable moment at Gauhati University, a 16-year-old school student’s research presentation at RegICON 2025 continues to draw attention in academic circles.

On Thursday, Royal Global School student Huma Abia Kanta, a Class XII science student, presented a full peer-reviewed paper during the regular technical track of the Regional International Conference on Natural Language Processing — a segment typically dominated by PhD scholars, researchers and faculty members.

A Rare Presence Among Senior Researchers

Hosted by the Department of Information Technology, the conference featured over 200 papers from researchers across India and abroad. Huma’s paper went through the same stringent review process as university submissions before being placed in the main technical sessions.

Long-time participants said they could recall “very few instances, if any,” where a school student had appeared in a mainstream NLP technical line-up. Most presenters, they said, are postgraduate scholars or early-career faculty.

The Research She Presented

Huma’s paper focused on building an AI-driven Sanskrit–Chinese phonology model, using an encoder–decoder architecture with Luong Attention to reconstruct Sanskrit sound patterns from historical Chinese Buddhist lexicon entries.

Titled “A Buddhist-Lexicon-Inspired Encoder–Decoder Model with Luong Attention: Seq2seq Reconstruction of Sanskrit Phonology via Tang-Era Siddham–Hanzi Transliteration,” the study was co-authored with Dr. Ankur Pan Saikia of Assam down town University and Dr. Utpal Barman of Assam Skill University.

The work outlines dataset construction, tokenisation methods and evaluation metrics. The authors report that their model achieved strong phonetic similarity to expert reconstructions, while noting that larger corpora and better handling of dialectal variations remain challenges for future work.

An Uncommon Academic Trajectory

Thursday’s presentation marked Huma’s second international-level research appearance this year. She had earlier presented an AI/ML paper at a conference in Azerbaijan. Mentors say such a record — two peer-reviewed papers and participation in senior research tracks — is “exceptionally uncommon for a school student in India.”

Beyond Research: Coding for Regional Languages

Huma also runs an open-source project called “desicodes”, which includes “asPy”, an Assamese-to-Python transpiler aimed at making coding accessible for first-generation learners and speakers of Northeastern languages. Additional language modules are in the works.

Significance for Assam’s Research Ecosystem

Her appearance at RegICON has been widely discussed online and among faculty, with many viewing it as an encouraging sign for early research culture in Assam. The conference itself also highlighted significant work in multilingual NLP, Assamese coreference resolution and technologies for endangered languages of the Northeast.

As reactions continue into the weekend, Huma’s Thursday presentation stands out as one of the most talked-about moments of this year’s RegICON — and a signal of what early scientific curiosity, given the right platform, can achieve.

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