arXiv Computation and Language

Qwenfant: Train Big Character-level BabyLMs on Concise Parallel Text

The paper presents Qwenfant, a Qwen3-based model trained on concise parallel text for the 2026 BabyLM Challenge’s Multilingual track. By leveraging LLM-summarized and translated data, a larger model size, and a character-level vocabulary—both fine-tuned with LoRA—the authors achieve a top ranking in the competition.

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 AI
Jun 2

EuroBERT: Scaling Multilingual Encoders for European Languages

arXiv:2503. 05500v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose multilingual vector representations, used in retrieval, regression and classification, are traditionally obtained from bidirectional encoder models.

By Nicolas Boizard, Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef, Duarte M. Alves, Andr\'e Martins, Ayoub Hammal, Caio Corro, C\'eline Hudelot, Emmanuel Malherbe, Etienne Malaboeuf, Fanny Jourdan, Gabriel Hautreux, Jo\~ao Alves, Kevin El Haddad, Manuel Faysse, Maxime Peyrard, Nuno M. Guerreiro, Patrick Fernandes, Ricardo Rei, Pierre Colombo
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

LLMTrace: A Corpus for Classification and Fine-Grained Localization of AI-Written Text

LLMTrace is a new large‑scale bilingual (English and Russian) corpus designed to improve AI‑written text detection. It contains character‑level annotations that enable precise localization of AI‑generated segments, supporting both full‑text binary classification and interval detection tasks. The dataset is built from a diverse set of modern proprietary and open‑source LLMs to address gaps in existing resources, such as outdated models, limited language coverage, and lack of mixed human‑AI authorship data.

By Irina Tolstykh, Aleksandra Tsybina, Sergey Yakubson, Maksim Kuprashevich
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

Scaling Multilingual Pretraining of Pixel Language Models

Pixel language models treat text as rendered images, enabling strong cross‑lingual transfer. This study trains MPIXEL models varying languages, scripts, and capacity while keeping per‑language compute constant, and evaluates them on five tasks across 83 languages. Results show that scaling improves performance on added languages and scripts, mitigates the curse of multilinguality, and outperforms subword and character baselines on typologically distant low‑resource languages, though transfer to unseen scripts does not benefit further from scaling.

By Ilker Kesen, Jenny Kunz, Kasra Malihi, Desmond Elliott
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 AI
Jun 12

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.

By Marek \v{S}uppa, Andrej Ridzik, Daniel Hl\'adek, Nat\'alia K\v{n}a\v{z}ekov\'a, Vikt\'oria Ondrejov\'a
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