arXiv Computation and Language

Loci Similes: A Benchmark for Extracting Intertextualities in Latin Literature

The paper introduces Loci Similes, a benchmark for detecting intertextual links in Latin literature. It provides a curated dataset of about 176,000 text segments and 1,490 expert-verified parallels, including 945 labeled references from an existing source. Baselines for retrieval and classification are established using both lexical methods and pretrained encoder language models.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Inspicio: Open-Vocabulary, LLM-Based Sense Retrieval for Historical Languages

Inspicio is an open‑vocabulary pipeline that links tokens in historical or low‑resource languages to synsets in the Open English WordNet without needing a source‑language sense inventory. It uses an instruction‑tuned LLM to generate two English translations, candidate dictionary definitions, and English lemmas, then performs hybrid retrieval combining dense definition similarity, sparse lemma matching, and Maximal Marginal Relevance re‑ranking. Evaluated on Latin, Ancient Greek, PREMOVE, and Italian data, the best configuration achieves 96% Recall@50 on a perception‑verb test set and remains competitive in out‑of‑domain and cross‑lingual scenarios.

By Michele Ciletti
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Improving Cross-Lingual Transfer for Sequential Sentence Classification in Research Papers via Structural Similarity

The paper investigates cross‑lingual transfer for sequential sentence classification (SSC) in research papers, focusing on 13 non‑English languages. Experiments show that linguistic proximity does not reliably predict transfer success, whereas structural similarity in rhetorical organization—particularly label distribution similarity—correlates positively with performance. The authors introduce three generative‑model methods that exploit structural cues, achieving parity with strong encoder baselines on‑domain and outperforming them when transferring to unseen languages.

By Kazuhiro Yamauchi, Marie Katsurai
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Learning from Many Voices: Literary MT Using Multi-Reference Human and Synthetic Data

The paper explores how to improve literary machine translation by using datasets that contain multiple valid translations of the same source text. It introduces a filtering framework that selects source texts whose references show meaningful variation while staying faithful, based on semantic similarity. Experiments show that fine‑tuning on medium to high similarity data outperforms low similarity data, and that using only this filtered subset can match or exceed performance achieved with the full unfiltered set. Additionally, the study compares synthetic translations generated by large language models with human expert translations, finding that fine‑tuning on human expert data yields better results in both automatic metrics and human evaluations, underscoring the continued importance of expert translations for literary MT.

By Si Wu, John Wieting, David A. Smith
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 AI
Sep 17

Knowledge-Graph Based Augmentation versus Retrieval Augmented Generation for Cultural-Related Question Answering

The paper compares Knowledge-Graph Based Augmentation (Graph-RAG) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for answering culturally specific questions. Using the LatamQA dataset, Graph-RAG, built automatically from Wikipedia via KGGen, matches RAG performance and reduces the base LLM’s error by 72% with a standard KG and 78% with a benchmark-aware variant. The approach also transfers zero‑shot to Portuguese, showing multilingual applicability.

By Pablo Poulenard, Yannis Karmim, Valentin Barri\`ere
arXiv AI
Jul 13

Automatic Thematic Indexing of Large Literary Corpora: A Machine Learning Approach to Voltaire's Complete Works

arXiv:2607. 09316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Thematic indexing -- the practice of assigning structured conceptual labels to sections of text -- is essential to scholarly access in large-scale literary and historical editions, yet it remains a largely manual, labour-intensive process.

By Miguel Arana-Catania, Gillian Pink, Glenn Roe
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Multilingual Idioms in Sentences and Conversations Across High-, Medium-, and Low-Resource Languages

arXiv:2606. 02147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Idiomatic expressions pose a major challenge for multilingual NLP because their meanings shift between figurative and literal usage, often requiring context for accurate interpretation.

By Saeed Almheiri, Bilal Elbouardi, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida, Irina Nikishina, Ashwath Rao B, Parameswari Krishnamurthy, Muhammad Cendekia Airlangga, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Nguyen Phan Gia Bao, Amir Hossein Yari, Hawau Olamide Toyin, Nurdaulet Mukhituly, Mena Attia, Besher Hassan, Ahmad Fathan Hidayatullah, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Haonan Li, Suma Bhat, Fajri Koto
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