arXiv Computation and Language

TatBLiMP: A Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for Tatar

TatBLiMP is the first benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs for the Tatar language, covering 16 morphosyntactic phenomena across 1,248 sentence pairs that differ by a single morpheme. Each pair contains one grammatical and one ungrammatical sentence, with the ungrammatical version generated by a deterministic perturbation and ratified by a native speaker. The benchmark evaluates models by comparing their assigned probabilities, allowing assessment without text generation or parsing, and tracks performance across from-scratch, cross‑lingual, and multilingual large language models.

arXiv AI
Jun 18

Morpheus: A Morphology-Aware Neural Tokenizer and Word Embedder for Turkish

arXiv:2606. 18717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turkish is agglutinative: meaning is carried by morphemes, yet the subword tokenizers that drive modern language models split words by corpus statistics, fragmenting semantically loaded suffixes and -- in the case of WordPiece and rule-based analyzers -- failing to decode their output back to the original text.

By Tolga \c{S}akar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

BHARATI: Morphology-Aware Tokenizers for Classical Indian Languages with Subword Fertility Analysis

arXiv:2607. 23319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard subword tokenization algorithms such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and SentencePiece are trained predominantly on modern language corpora and produce inefficient segmentations when applied to classical Indian languages.

By Poornima Kumaresan, Pavithra Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran, Santhosh Sivasubramani
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Vowel Signs Are Not Letters: A Pre-tokenization Ceiling on Multilingual Tokenizer Fertility

The paper shows that HuggingFace’s ByteLevel pre‑tokenizer, which treats a word as a sequence of Unicode letters, splits abugida scripts at every vowel sign, creating a training‑free lower bound on tokenizer fertility. Across 26 languages, all 17 abugidas exhibit increased token counts (up to 9×), while Latin, Cyrillic, Hangul, and Han remain unchanged. The authors demonstrate that correcting the character class reduces Nepali token counts, improves model performance, and that this issue is widespread in popular HuggingFace models.

By Sajal Regmi, Siddhartha Pudasaini, Chetan Phakami Pun
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

5-Dialects-BN: Unmasking the Impact of Transliteration on Bangla Dialectal LLMs

5-Dialects-BN is a new Bangla dialect benchmark that aligns Romanized transliteration with dialectal text, Standard Bangla, English, and subjectivity labels across five regional varieties. The dataset contains 6,000 manually annotated entries from Chittagong, Barisal, Noakhali, Sylhet, and Rangpur, each enriched with five aligned annotations produced and cross‑validated by native speakers and linguistics students. It supports tasks such as dialect identification, normalization, translation, subjectivity classification, and efficient fine‑tuning of multilingual LLMs.

By Md Mahir Jawad, Galib Mahmud Jim, Rafid Ahmed, Mir Sazzat Hossain, Md Fahim, Md Farhad Alam Bhuiyan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Embedding Initialization for Unseen Low-resource Languages in Multilingual NMT: A Case Study on Limbum-English Translation

arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.

By Samiratu Ntohsi, Neza David Tuyishimire, Anesu Kafesu, Marvin Ogore, Samuel Oluwajunwonlo Babalola, Oche Ankeli