arXiv Machine Learning

Contextual Embedding Evidence for Main--Light Verb Distinctions in Urdu

The study examines Urdu light verbs, which add schematic event meaning while staying lexically linked to their main verbs. Using contextual embeddings from UrduBERT, DunbaaBERT, and multilingual BERT on 1,126 sentences, the authors find significant representational separation between main and light uses across all verb–model pairs, yet main and light uses of the same lemma remain closer than mismatched pairs. In a seven‑way prediction task limited to light uses, UrduBERT achieves 0.866 accuracy and 0.852 macro‑F1, and maintains 0.782 accuracy when tested on unseen preceding forms, demonstrating generalization beyond local verb combinations.

arXiv AI
4d ago

'Ghaib in Translation' aka Unseen Harm: Measuring Cross-Script Safety Inconsistency with 'Missed-in-Urdu' Scores in LLM Hate Speech Detection

The paper "Ghaib in Translation" investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle Urdu, a widely spoken language that is largely absent from safety evaluations. Five prominent LLMs—GPT‑4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen‑2.5, and Llama‑3.1—were tested on six datasets covering Nastaliq Urdu, Roman Urdu, English, and code‑switched Urdu‑English. The study found significant label instability between original‑script and English‑translation classifications, with missed‑in‑Urdu rates ranging from 2.4% to 9.9% (median 4.3%). A review of 205 papers across nine ALW/WOAH editions revealed no dedicated Urdu research, underscoring the language’s neglect in current safety research.

By Fawzia Zehra (Fuzzy), Kara-Isitt, Sonal Khosla, Stephen Swift
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 AI
Aug 20

Efficient Adaptation of LLMs for Hate Speech Detection in Low-Resource Languages: A Comparative Study on Roman Urdu

The paper evaluates large language models for hate‑speech detection in Roman Urdu, a low‑resource language with informal spelling variations. Using the Parameter‑Efficient Fine‑Tuning technique Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the authors fine‑tune models such as Mistral, LLaMA, Falcon, and multilingual BERT on the 72,000‑comment PURUTT dataset. While zero‑shot performance yields an F1 of 0.56, fine‑tuning a small fraction of parameters boosts F1 scores above 0.93, demonstrating that PEFT offers both high accuracy and computational efficiency for low‑resource language tasks.

By Toneema Zubair, Muhammad Junaid Asif, Faisal Kamiran, Hafiz Hassan Saeed, Rana Fayyaz Ahmad