TranslatePsy-AfriSLM is an open‑source machine‑translation resource set for 19 Sub‑Saharan African languages, comprising curated parallel data, African‑specialized synthetic data, and a family of fine‑tuned small language models (SLMs). The authors demonstrate that a unified quality‑estimation filtering can remove up to 96% of training tokens without harming quality, and that filtered synthetic data dominates the quality‑efficiency Pareto frontier. Models trained on this mixture outperform much larger systems such as TranslateGemma‑27B and Qwen3.5‑122B‑A10B, achieving superior performance with as few as 0.8 B parameters.
By Milan Gritta, Patrik Lambert, Jihye Back, Amril Nazir
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:2608. 10812v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study reference-free post-training for multilingual machine translation with open large language models.
By Chris Han, Pengzhi Gao, Pei Fu, Jian Luan
arXiv:2606. 03219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: African languages have very little labelled data, and it is unclear if augmenting the quantity of annotation data reliably enhances downstream performance.
By Anuj Tiwari, Oluwapelumi Ogunremu, Terry Oko-odion, Jesujuwon Egbewale, Hannah Nwokocha
arXiv:2605.28042v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art machine translation performance, but they do so as broad generalists largely tra...
By Liu O. Martin, Lucas Bandarkar, Nanyun Peng
Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synthetic parallel corpus with approximately 4.
LuxIT is a monolingual instruction‑tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, created by synthesizing instruction‑answer pairs from native texts using the DeepSeek‑R1‑0528 model and a quality‑assurance LLM‑as‑judge process. The resulting 227,507 high‑quality pairs were used to fine‑tune 14 LLMs (≤15 B parameters), yielding an average accuracy increase of +5.37 percentage points on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and improvements in macro‑averaged F1 on nine of the fourteen downstream NLP tasks. These findings demonstrate that synthetic monolingual data can effectively enhance LLM performance in low‑resource languages and reveal the complex relationship between exam performance and practical NLP gains.
By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot
arXiv:2608.12018v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at cross-lingual tasks but often fail to capture intra-lingual morphologica...
By Rakib Ullah, Md. Ruhul Islam, Tanbir Ahmed, Nayan Kumar Nath
We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2. 0 self-supervised speech encoder.
arXiv:2607. 09424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Soofi S 30B-A3B, a sovereign, open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) hybrid Mamba Transformer foundation model for German and English.
By The Soofi-Team, :, Benedikt Droste, David Fitzek, Ruben H\"arle, Lukas Helff, Maximilian Idahl, Alex Jude, Abbas Goher Khan, Maurice Kraus, Timm Ruland, Richard Rutmann, Sebastian Sztwiertnia, Markus Frey, Daniil Gurgurov, Jan Pfister, Tom R\"ohr, Sebastian von Rohrscheidt, J\"org Bienert, Nicolas Flores-Herr, Simon Gottschalk, Andreas Hotho, Kristian Kersting, Joachim K\"ohler, Alexander L\"oser, Wolfgang Nejdl, Simon Ostermann, Jan Plogsties, Patrick Putzky, Mehdi Ali, Michael Fromm, Max L\"ubbering
arXiv:2608. 04586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in speech-to-text translation (S2TT).
By Yexing Du, Kaiyuan Liu, Youcheng Pan, Bo Yang, Chengpeng Fu, Yu Wang, Ming Liu
arXiv:2607. 04814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale.
By Andrei Florian, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Hope Kerubo Ombaba, Xiaoyu Cui, Boniface Mwau, Biatus Maina Kamau, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Christiane Fellbaum, Happy Buzaaba