arXiv Computation and Language

English Word Sense Disambiguation in 2026: When the Labels Become the Bottleneck

The paper reports that in English all‑words word sense disambiguation (WSD), the scarcity of high‑quality labels—not the models—has become the limiting factor. The authors introduce lexEN, a human‑adjudicated correction layer over the Maru2022 ALL_NEW benchmark, and SenseBench, a living leaderboard for LLM WSD evaluation. They show that frontier large language models reach about 95 % accuracy on lexEN‑v1, that relabeling corpora with these models improves downstream systems, and that fine‑grained WordNet senses are often ill‑posed, with coarsening improving both annotator agreement and model performance. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that improving label quality and managing annotation costs are now the critical challenges for advancing WSD performance, as model accuracy is already near its theoretical ceiling."

arXiv AI
Jun 3

CoEval: Ranking Language Models for Custom Tasks Without Labeled Data or Trustworthy Benchmarks

arXiv:2606. 03650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Choosing or ranking language models for a specific application is hardest when no task-specific labeled data exists, and standard public benchmarks cannot be trusted, their items having likely leaked into pretraining, so scores reflect memorization rather than fitness.

By Alexander Apartsin, Yehudit Aperstein
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Nested Byte-Level Vocabularies Are Cheap to Deploy and Expensive to Share: A Pre-Registered Negative Result

The paper demonstrates that a byte‑level BPE tokenizer can be sliced to create multiple vocabulary sizes from a single trained model, preserving exact logits while reducing deployed weights by 66%. Experiments on 30 models show that while sliced models match the full model numerically, they underperform fixed‑cap specialists by a few percentage points in bits‑per‑byte. Multi‑cap training improves robustness to typographical noise, suggesting benefits from training across multiple granularities rather than from control tokens alone.

By Christos Koutsiaris
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

OraclePhys: A Systematic Framework for LLM Fine-Tuning on Structural Mechanics

OraclePhys is a fine‑tuning framework for large language models on structural mechanics, comprising a graded benchmark (OraclePhys‑Bench), a 30K supervision dataset (OraclePhys‑30K), and a controlled training study. The study shows that the form of the label’s answer, rather than its length, determines what the model learns, and that certain training objectives can produce models that match or exceed existing LLMs on spatial structural response tasks. The trained 8B model reaches the data‑precision frontier, outperforming zero‑shot and 32‑shot baselines at a specialist level.

By Mingyu Li, Guorui Song, Jing Lin, Haoqian Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

PoolBench: A Benchmark for Pooling Strategies in Concept Representation Evaluation for Decoder-Only LLMs

arXiv:2608. 05162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pooling is a consequential but under-examined design choice in decoder-only concept representation work: practitioners must collapse token-level hidden states into a passage-level vector, yet no shared protocol exists for comparing this choice across concepts, models, and tasks.

By Ayushi Agarwal