arXiv AI

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.

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 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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Squeezing More from Limited Data with Recursive Transformers

The paper investigates how to effectively pre‑train language models when the data budget is limited but compute is plentiful. It shows that increasing model size only improves performance up to an optimal point, after which overfitting degrades generalization, and that this optimal size varies with both the data budget and downstream tasks. To overcome the inefficiencies of standard Transformers in this regime, the authors propose recursive Transformers that reuse a shared block across depth and employ factorized embeddings, achieving better results than standard models on 10M–100M word pre‑training budgets and competitive performance with BabyLM Challenge 2025 winners.

By Serdar G\"ulbahar, Lukas Edman, Alexander Fraser
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

MultiSynt/MT: Trillion-Token Multi-Parallel Pre-Training Data Translated Across 36 Languages

arXiv:2607.00890v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synth...

By Maximilian Idahl, J\"org Tiedemann, Sampo Pyysalo, David Salinas, Tomasz Galica, Shenbin Qian, Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Zihao Li, Anna Lokrantz, Fedor Vitiugin, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Jenna Kanerva, Filip Ginter, Matthias Lindemann, Tim Isbister, Birger Moell, Jonas Lindh, Jan Haji\v{c}, Jenia Jitsev, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen, Gema Ram\'irez-S\'anchez
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

EnSiTa - A Trilingual Multi-Domain Parallel Dataset and Benchmark for Domain-Specific Machine Translation

EnSiTa is a trilingual multi‑domain parallel dataset and benchmark for English, Sinhala, and Tamil. It contains human post‑edited training data across seven domains and professionally translated test sets for those domains plus an additional one, all produced through a multi‑year, rigorously quality‑controlled process. The authors use EnSiTa to conduct a comprehensive study of domain‑specific machine translation across six language directions, comparing from‑scratch Transformers, pre‑trained models, and decoder‑only LLMs under various training‑data sizes, model scales, and domain settings.

By Surangika Ranathunga, Nisansa de Silva, Aloka Fernando, Kavindu Warnakulasuriya, Isuru Wijesiri, Menan Velayuthan, Charitha Rathnayaka, Thivaharan Varatharajan, Sajeevi Silva, Piumi Kandanaarachchi, Uthayasanker Thayasivam
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