The paper investigates whether fine‑tuning improves how language models use supplied Bangladeshi legal text in bilingual question‑answering. Using a hierarchy‑preserving statutory corpus, 2,165 fine‑tuning examples, and a 150‑item control set, the authors evaluate six instruction‑tuned models with multiple LoRA seeds, separating scoring, retrieval, and model effects. Results show that while fine‑tuning can boost overall accuracy, it does not increase the models’ reliance on the governing provision, highlighting the need to disentangle scorer, retriever, and model contributions in legal adaptation studies.
By Moniruzzaman Mahadi, Abrar Mohammed Tanzim Alam, Sayma Siddika Monalisa, Mir Mohammad Asif Abdullah, Swakkhar Shatabda, Md Adnan Arefeen
arXiv:2606. 18699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored.
By Fei-Yueh Chen, Chun Huang Lin, Chan Wei Hsu, Kuan Hsuan Yeh, Zih-Ching Chen, Kuan-Ming Chen, Patrick Chung-Chia Huang
arXiv:2608.28645v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Low-resource languages without an adequate training corpus often use a related, higher-resource language as a scaffold for comprehension. Still, ther...
By Sindhu Shetty, Spurthi Setty, Natan Vidra
KhatianDoc is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on Bengali legal land records, specifically the handwritten RS Khatians used in Bangladesh. The benchmark comprises four tasks—symbol recognition, base‑16 to decimal conversion, structured field extraction, and legal document question answering—drawn from 107 real records and 1,634 QA pairs. Six multimodal LLMs were evaluated under a zero‑shot protocol, revealing that many models fail to answer a significant portion of questions correctly and perform poorly on arithmetic conversion, highlighting a lack of capability rather than a performance gap.
By Tasmiad Hasan, Arafat Zaman Ratul, Sarker Sadman Saalim, S. M. Shah Nawaz Hossain, Khan Raiyan Ibne Reza, Sumaiya Tabassum Nimi
arXiv:2605. 25420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model safety evaluation remains heavily English-centered, leaving low-resource languages under-measured even when models are deployed globally.
By Khalid Yusuf Dahir
IndicQE-APE is a consolidated benchmark that unifies quality estimation (QE) and automatic post‑editing (APE) data for nine Indic language pairs, comprising 126,754 instances with multiple aligned labels such as direct assessment, human post‑edit, word‑level OK/BAD tags, and error explanations. The dataset includes a stratified test set across four difficulty axes and supports training and evaluation of six prompted large language models, three COMET metrics, and three APE systems. Experiments reveal that segments with conflicting holistic and token‑level quality signals are consistently ranked lower, while annotator disagreement shows no effect when controlled for score distribution.
whyItMatters":"The benchmark provides a unified resource for training and evaluating QE and APE across Indic languages, enabling consistent comparison of models and metrics on a shared dataset."
By Diptesh Kanojia, Archchana Sindhujan, Sourabh Deoghare, Daria Sokova, Shenbin Qian, Girish Koushik, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Constantin Or\u{a}san, Chrysoula Zerva, Ricardo Rei, Fr\'ed\'eric Blain, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Marco Turchi, Matteo Negri, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Mitesh M. Khapra, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.
By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv:2608.30092v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We present Arkios, a 1.04B-parameter dense transformer pretrained from scratch on 150B tokens of bilingual English-Nepali text, using a custom single...
By Sajal Regmi, Siddhartha Pudasaini, Chetan Phakami Pun
arXiv:2605. 29738v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Legal NLP benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate a single language or aggregate tasks that differ fundamentally across jurisdictions, making cross-lingual comparison impossible.
By Volodymyr Ovcharov
arXiv:2608. 08512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evolving documents, such as laws, tax codes, and software documentation, are amended, replaced, and sometimes reverted over time, so a question has different correct answers at different dates.
By Mahbub E Sobhani, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Fahmid Hasan Chowdhury, Md Adnan Arefeen, Farig Sadeque, Md. Faizul Bari, Swakkhar Shatabda
Indic quality estimation (QE) and automatic post-editing (APE) data is spread across separate releases, so no single resource supports training and evaluation across tasks and language pairs on one footing. We consolidate the WMT 2020--2024 shared-task lineage with an extended English--Malayalam resource into \indicqe: $126{,}754$ instances over nine directional pairs, with up to four label types aligned on the same segment, a direct assessment, a human post-edit, word-level OK/BAD tags and an error explanation, and a test set stratified over four difficulty axes.
The paper reports on building a retrieval‑augmented legal assistant for Uzbek that operates in both a managed cloud service and an on‑premises deployment. It introduces two new domain benchmarks—one for retrieval and one for end‑to‑end QA—and shows that fine‑tuning an open‑weight text embedder (UTE‑1) can close the performance gap with proprietary models under tight cost and latency constraints. The authors also provide negative results for a QLoRA experiment and release the benchmarks, evaluation code, and the fine‑tuned embedder for future low‑resource legal NLP work.
By Tatul Danielyan, Mariam Avetisyan, Hrant Davtyan