arXiv Computation and Language

Cross-Dialect NER for Bangla Regional Dialects Using Leave-One-Dialect-Out Cross-Validation and Explainable AI

The paper introduces a cross-dialect Named Entity Recognition (NER) framework for Bangla, leveraging the ANCHOLIK-NER dataset that covers five major regional dialects. Using a Leave-One-Dialect-Out Cross-Validation strategy, eight transformer-based models were evaluated, with Multilingual-E5 Large achieving the best performance (F1 up to 97.26% on Mymensingh, 82.38% on Chattogram). Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) revealed that the models rely mainly on the surface form of entity words rather than surrounding context, suggesting a direction for future improvement.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

5-Dialects-BN: Unmasking the Impact of Transliteration on Bangla Dialectal LLMs

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.

By Md Mahir Jawad, Galib Mahmud Jim, Rafid Ahmed, Mir Sazzat Hossain, Md Fahim, Md Farhad Alam Bhuiyan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Generative vs. Encoder Models for Multilingual NER: A Comprehensive Empirical Study on Naamapadam

The paper compares generative and encoder-based neural models for multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) across the eleven languages of the Naamapadam benchmark. Five classic model families, four decoder-only large language models fine‑tuned with LoRA and 4‑bit NF4 quantisation, and nine generative models in zero‑to‑5‑shot inference were evaluated under strict CoNLL span‑level metrics. Encoder-based models (mBERT and XLM‑R) achieved substantially higher F1 scores—up to 0.675 on Hindi—than any generative architecture, with gaps of 7.5–40 percentage points; the best few‑shot result reached only 28% of the encoder baseline. The study identifies three language clusters (encoder‑dominant, partial‑coverage, and failure‑zone) and offers deployment guidelines based on transfer learning and low‑resource NLP principles.

By Jakkala Mahesh, Jatavath Shravan Kumar, Komalla Shivani, Sujoy Sarkar
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 12

How Robust Are LLMs to Vietnamese Dialects?

arXiv:2608. 10414v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically evaluated on standard written Vietnamese, yet everyday communication frequently involves regional dialects that preserve meaning but differ in surface form.

By Minh Tran, Trinh Chau, Thanh-Nhan Le, Nam Tran, Luan Thanh Nguyen, Cuong Dang, Duc Hoang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

The Dialect Tax: Dialectal Biases Persist throughout the Language Modeling Pipeline

The study investigates why language models exhibit systematic performance gaps across English dialects, a phenomenon termed the "dialect tax." Using parallel dialect corpora that preserve meaning while altering surface form, the authors confirm that models treat Standard American English and dialectal texts as semantically equivalent, yet find representational disparities that persist through tokenization, pre‑training, post‑training, and inference. Even a character‑level tokenizer does not eliminate input/output asymmetries or accuracy gaps, and dialect pairs produce more divergent gradient updates than unrelated Standard texts, indicating that dialectal content is harder for models to learn.

By Elle
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition

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