arXiv Machine Learning

Nepali Passport Question Answering: A Low-Resource Dataset for Public Service Applications

The paper introduces a Nepali Question‑Answer dataset focused on passport‑related FAQs to support information retrieval in a low‑resource language. The authors fine‑tune transformer‑based embedding models for semantic similarity and compare them against the BM25 baseline. Their experiments show that fine‑tuned SBERT models outperform BM25, while multilingual E5 embeddings achieve the best overall retrieval performance.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Align Then Adapt: Label-Efficient Adapter Learning for Asymmetric Dense Retrieval

The paper introduces Efficient Retrieval Adapter (ERA), a query‑side adapter framework that enables dense retrieval systems to adapt to asymmetric query–document scenarios without re‑indexing. ERA first aligns the embedding spaces of a powerful query embedder and a lightweight document embedder using unlabeled documents, then fine‑tunes the aligned query representation with a small set of labeled query‑document pairs. In experiments on 126 MAIR retrieval tasks across six domains, ERA boosts average nDCG@10 by up to 8.2 points in symmetric settings and over 12 points in asymmetric settings while requiring far fewer labels than fully supervised adapter training.

By Seiji Maekawa, Moin Aminnaseri, Pouya Pezeshkpour, Estevam Hruschka
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

NepKANUN: A RAG-Based Nepali Legal Assistant

The paper introduces NepKANUN, an AI-powered legal assistant designed specifically for Nepali legal texts. Built on a fine‑tuned large language model and integrated into a Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, it delivers precise answers to natural language legal queries. Evaluated with BERTScore, the system achieved strong F1 scores of 0.82, 0.77, and 0.71 across simple, moderate, and complex question categories, and expert reviews confirm its usability.

By Bhabuk Thapa, Prasiddha Koirala, Ranjit Raut, Sunil Regmi, Bal Krishna Bal
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

L3Cube-IndicQuest v2: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Factual Knowledge of Large Language Models Across Indic Languages

arXiv:2608. 15535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present L3Cube-IndicQuest v2, a large-scale gold-standard multilingual question-answering benchmark for evaluating the India-specific factual knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs).

By Rinit Jain, Tirthraj Mahajan, Advait Joshi, Raviraj Joshi
arXiv AI
Jun 12

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

arXiv:2606. 13647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types -- nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak.

By Marek \v{S}uppa, Andrej Ridzik, Daniel Hl\'adek, Nat\'alia K\v{n}a\v{z}ekov\'a, Vikt\'oria Ondrejov\'a
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Language Specific Knowledge: Do Models Know Better in X than in English?

The paper introduces the concept of Language Specific Knowledge (LSK), showing that multilingual language models can answer certain queries better when prompted in a language other than English, sometimes even in low‑resource languages. It defines a language‑selection problem and presents several baseline methods, including the authors’ LSKExtractor, to empirically demonstrate that choosing the optimal language can improve question‑answering performance across datasets covering cultural and social norms. Experiments reveal non‑intuitive mappings, such as Gemma models excelling on Chinese and Middle Eastern topics in Spanish and Qwen models performing best on authority and responsibility queries in Arabic and Chinese.

By Ishika Agarwal, Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Parameter-Efficient Retrievers for Polish and European Languages

The paper introduces a three‑stage training pipeline that builds compact, efficient dense retrievers without requiring ground‑truth relevance labels. Using cross‑lingual alignment, relational knowledge distillation, and contrastive fine‑tuning, the authors develop PolDense (six Polish models ranging from 17 M to 1 B parameters) and EuroDense (a 435 M‑parameter model covering nine European languages). Extensive evaluation on 41 Polish and 150 multilingual tasks shows that PolDense‑1B outperforms larger retrievers up to 9 B parameters, while EuroDense leads in task‑averaged and language‑averaged performance among models below 1 B parameters.

By S{\l}awomir Dadas, Rafa{\l} Po\'swiata, Ma{\l}gorzata Gr\k{e}bowiec, Micha{\l} Pere{\l}kiewicz
arXiv AI
Sep 3

ViSAR: Training-Free Adaptive-$k$ Retrieval for Visual Document Question Answering

ViSAR is a training‑free, adaptive‑k retrieval method for Visual Document Question Answering that operates directly in the embedding space to build a query‑conditioned page‑level similarity matrix. By dynamically selecting the number of pages to retrieve based on query relevance, ViSAR reduces Retrieval‑Augmented Generation latency by up to 58.7% while maintaining or improving answer accuracy across multiple encoders and Large Vision‑Language Models. The structure of the similarity matrix also correlates with answer accuracy, indicating potential for retrieval quality‑aware document understanding.

By Adrien Mialland, Marc Plantevit, Julien Gallois, C\'eline Robardet