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 Computation and Language
Oct 8

sk-bench: A Native-First Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Slovak

arXiv:2610.09152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual LLM benchmarks omit Slovak, a morphologically rich West Slavic language of five million speakers, or cover it only by machine translation....

By Marek \v{S}uppa, Ivan Vykopal, Andrej Ridzik, Kristi\'an Sopkovi\v{c}, Nat\'alia K\v{n}a\v{z}ekov\'a, Jaroslav Kop\v{c}an, Miroslav Bl\v{s}t\'ak, Vikt\'oria Ondrejov\'a, Daniel Hl\'adek, Michal Gregor, Martin Tamajka, Mari\'an \v{S}imko
arXiv AI
5d ago

Label-Wording Augmentation in a Typed-Decision Encoder: Gains on Unfamiliar Words, Not on Abbreviations or Codes

The paper evaluates a 307‑million‑parameter multilingual cross‑encoder, Ru‑Jev, on Russian‑language tasks, comparing its original and an augmented release that presents routing labels in multiple surface forms. Experiments show that the augmentation improves accuracy on unfamiliar ordinary words, borrowed jargon, and office slang—up to 0.24 points—while providing no benefit for abbreviations or opaque codes. The study also highlights evaluation hazards and notes that increased accuracy often coincides with reduced risk‑coverage, especially with many candidate labels.

By Vladimir Beskorovainyi
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 19

Pearl-Chat: Engineering a native Luganda language model from first principles in JAX and Flax NNX

Pearl-Chat is an 8.5‑million‑parameter causal decoder‑only transformer built from first principles in JAX and Flax NNX, specifically engineered for the low‑resource Bantu language Luganda. It uses a byte‑level BPE tokenizer trained from scratch on curated Luganda corpora, achieving a two‑fold compression improvement over larger models like LLaMA‑3 and Gemma. The model is trained in two stages—pre‑training on diverse Luganda text and instruction fine‑tuning on dialogues—reaching a validation perplexity of 1.20 and high ROUGE‑L and BLEU scores on a held‑out diagnostic benchmark, with all weights, tokenizers, and code released openly.

By Wesley Kambale, Roland Sankara
arXiv Computation and Language
Nov 4

Saidzoda-Tajik-E5-Large: Fine-Tuning a 560M Embedder for Tajik Retrieval

Saidzoda‑Tajik‑E5‑Large is a 560 M‑parameter Tajik text embedder fine‑tuned from multilingual‑e5‑large‑instruct. The authors generated 235,140 question‑passage pairs from Tajik laws, tax documents, Wikipedia and web text, trained for one epoch with hard negatives, and mixed in English and Russian pairs to preserve multilingual performance. On unseen Tajik law and tax passages the model retrieves the correct answer in the top ten for 93.6 % and 94.5 % of questions, respectively, outperforming the base model and matching larger models on similar tasks.

By Tohir Saidzoda, Nekruz Maxudov, Bedil Karimov, Abubakr Abdullozoda, Amin Jalilov, Jonibek Kishvarov, Rahmonali Sharipov, Mariyamkhon Shodyeva
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Multilingual GSM-Symbolic: What determines capability transfer across languages?

The paper introduces Multilingual GSM‑Symbolic, a large multilingual math dataset with 30,000 question‑answer pairs across 15 languages, designed to evaluate cross‑lingual capability transfer using symbolic templates that generate millions of variations. It quantifies key determinants of transfer—model size, language resource level, reasoning ability, and typological distance—showing that larger models and better reasoning reduce performance gaps between low‑ and high‑resource languages, while typological distance has limited impact. The authors present a predictive framework that explains 92 % of language‑to‑language variation and can estimate unseen language performance within 6 pp, improving to 4.2 pp with only ten target‑language templates.

By Kenneth Enevoldsen, Riley Herchert, Sofie Mosegaard, Dan Saattrup Smart, Simon Enni, Isaac Chung, Sofie Bruun, Ayush Sunil Munot, Max M\"uller-Eberstein, Adnan El-Assadi, Elisa Bassignana, Gianluca Barmina, Hafsteinn Einarsson, Iben Nyholm Debess, Linda Freienthal, Lukas Galke Poech, Mike Zhang, Nicolas Legrand, Vladimir Salnikov, Yevhen Kostiuk, Zafar Hussain, Sagandeep Kaur, Agnes Toftg{\aa}rd, Marie Mattson, Kristoffer Nielbo
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 Computation and Language
Sep 25

Scoring Both Directions: LLMs realize the MRS they cannot reliably parse

The paper evaluates two large language models, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Opus 5, on the bidirectional English Resource Grammar (ERG) tasks of generating English from Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) and parsing English into MRS. In generation, Opus achieves 76.3 BLEU—surpassing a 72k‑pair trained system and matching a million‑pair system—while Sonnet scores 65.7 BLEU, rising to 69.6 when selecting from ACE’s candidates. In parsing, both models lag behind ACE, attaining only 57.2 and 65.5 F₁ respectively, with exact‑match on about 1 % of sentences, highlighting that high generation scores do not guarantee accurate semantic parsing.

By Soham Dan
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