The paper presents a specialized NMT model for the Masewalkopa variant of Nawatl, a low‑resource language from Mexico. Using a 70,000‑pair multi‑variant foundation, the authors curate 2,665 parallel pairs and augment them with 192 elder‑transcribed sentences via asymmetric back‑translation. A custom finite‑state analyzer reduces unanalyzed forms from 82.0% to 19.9% and supplies functional syntax tags as prefixes, enabling the model to reuse subword embeddings and achieve a dev chrF++ of 58.46 and test chrF++ scores around 58.0. The final LoRA‑v9c‑b model is quantized with CTranslate2 int8, cutting CPU latency from 137.5 to 1.8–2.6 seconds per request for cost‑bounded Cloud Run deployment.
arXiv:2610.22529v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive foundation language models predominantly target high-resource Indo-European languages, imposing computational and morphological penaltie...
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.
arXiv:2610.19388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Massively multilingual speech modeling has made remarkable progress in recent years, yet existing training resources and benchmarks still underrepresen...
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...
5-Dialects-BN is a new Bangla dialect benchmark that aligns Romanized transliteration with dialectal text, Standard Bangla, English, and subjectivity labels across five regional varieties. The dataset contains 6,000 manually annotated entries from Chittagong, Barisal, Noakhali, Sylhet, and Rangpur, each enriched with five aligned annotations produced and cross‑validated by native speakers and linguistics students. It supports tasks such as dialect identification, normalization, translation, subjectivity classification, and efficient fine‑tuning of multilingual LLMs.
arXiv:2609.09554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. L...
The paper investigates weight‑space merging of independently fine‑tuned multilingual machine translation models. Experiments show that merging is more successful when models share a target language, yet it still cannot match the peak performance of language‑specific checkpoints. When target languages differ, performance drops sharply, and analysis reveals that overlapping neuron activation and incompatible upper‑layer geometries cause these failures.
arXiv:2608. 04586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in speech-to-text translation (S2TT).
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...
arXiv:2608. 04586v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in speech-to-text translation (S2TT).
The paper presents a pipeline that leverages large language models to extract grammatical rules, example sentences, and lexicons from descriptive grammar books, producing synthetic parallel corpora for fine‑tuning machine translation models. Evaluated on three low‑resource languages—Kalamang, Tuatschin, and Mandan—the synthetic data improves translation quality over seed‑data baselines in 75% of configurations for Kalamang and 59% for Tuatschin, achieving up to +8.8 ChrF++ gains. A factorial study across 96 configurations identifies which combinations of target part‑of‑speech, retrieval granularity, and sample volume drive performance gains and where they fail, demonstrating that static linguistic documentation can be repurposed for practical translation tools for severely under‑resourced languages.
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.