arXiv AI

MixLID: Token-Level Language Identification in Mixed-Language Text

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

IndicTriMix: Developing Language Identification Datasets and Models for Tri-Language Code-Mixing

IndicTriMix presents a new benchmark and models for token‑level language identification in tri‑language code‑mixed text involving Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali. The authors reformulate the task as sequence labeling and fine‑tune transformer models MuRIL and XLM‑RoBERTa, evaluating them on manually annotated test sets. They also introduce two code‑mixing generation methods using parallel sentences and release the datasets and fine‑tuned models for public use.

By Pruthwik Mishra, Rudra Trivedi, Avi Patel, Ashok Urlana, Shrikant Malviya
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

What Language is This? Ask Your Tokenizer

The paper introduces UniLID, a lightweight language identification method that uses the UnigramLM tokenization algorithm to predict a string’s language by evaluating which language’s unigram distribution best explains the text. UniLID is data‑ and compute‑efficient, allows incremental addition of new languages without retraining, and can be integrated into existing tokenization pipelines. Experiments show competitive performance against baselines such as fasttext, GlotLID‑M, and CLD3, achieving 69% accuracy with five labeled samples per language and 89% with 25, and delivering significant gains on fine‑grained dialect identification.

By Clara Meister, Ahmetcan Yavuz, Pietro Lesci, Tiago Pimentel
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Improving Language Identification for Code-Switched Utterances with Integer Linear Programming

The paper addresses the challenge of identifying code‑switched utterances in language identification systems. It revisits the MaskLID approach, highlighting its overreliance on word‑level language association scores, and reformulates its optimization as an Integer Linear Program to incorporate clear, interpretable constraints. These enhancements significantly improve performance across ten diverse languages on code‑switching benchmarks, with the authors releasing code and data for reproducibility.

By Joanna Rado{\l}a, Josep Maria Crego, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Improving Cross-Lingual Token Representations by Adding a Pinch of SALT

The paper introduces SALT, a lightweight post‑training technique that injects span‑level supervision into existing cross‑lingual sentence encoders to enhance token representations. Evaluated on five multilingual token‑level benchmarks, SALT achieves the best overall results on four tasks, surpassing alternative fine‑tuning methods and competitive encoders. Additionally, SALT improves sentence‑level performance on cross‑lingual retrieval and classification tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of span‑level supervision for both token and sentence representations.

By Guillem Ram\'irez
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Feeding BabyLMs Macaroni: Code-Switching Curricula Cause Cross-Lingual Convergence

The paper investigates whether training small decoder-only transformers on code‑switched text can induce cross‑lingual alignment. Using two 100‑million‑word multilingual corpora—one a mix of English, Dutch, and Chinese BabyBabelLM data, and another generated by inserting word‑ and sentence‑level code‑switching via an LLM—the authors find that code‑switched training aligns representations of parallel text, especially across different scripts, and that this alignment persists when later training on monolingual documents. A curriculum that progresses from word‑level code‑switching to sentence‑level code‑switching and finally to monolingual data yields models that outperform baselines on the BabyLM evaluation suite, demonstrating that code‑switching curriculum learning is an effective data augmentation strategy for multilingual pretraining.

By Dries Rooryck, Alex Cai, Yonatan Belinkov, David Alvarez-Melis, Kiant\'e Brantley
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Apples to Apples? Towards Comparable Crosslingual Language Model Evaluation

The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.

By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

To Each Language Its Tokenizer: Modular Tokenizers for Efficient Multilingual LLMs

The paper proposes a modular tokenizer framework for multilingual large language models, allowing the creation of language‑specific subtokenizers that match monolingual compression quality. It introduces a pretraining strategy that samples these subtokenizers to limit predictions to relevant vocabularies, enabling efficient training and inference. This approach reduces memory usage and speeds up inference without compromising performance.

By Franck Signe, Hippolyte Pilchen, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon, \'Edouard Grave