arXiv AI

Cross Lingual Transfer in Tulu Legal Comprehension: Script-Dependent Improvement and RAG-Induced Knowledge Conflict

arXiv AI
Sep 3

VakyArth: Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in LLMs across Indic Languages

VakyArth is the first pragmatic benchmark for Indic languages, covering Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Malayalam. It tests models on five pragmatic phenomena—deixis, speech acts, implicature, social pragmatics, and coherence—using multiple-choice questions, natural language inference, and translation tasks authored by native speakers. Evaluation of multilingual LLMs shows consistent failures on pragmatic meanings rooted in Indic linguistic and cultural conventions, with systematic differences across languages and tasks.

By Usneek Singh, Poorvaja Veera Balaji Kumar, Parth Nanda, Anand Madhusoodanan, Geyang Guo, Wei Xu, Junyi Jessy L
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Obscuring Data Contamination Through Translation: Evidence from Arabic Corpora

The study investigates how exposing large language models to Arabic translations of English benchmark tasks can hide data contamination from standard English-only detection methods. By testing four instruction-tuned models with increasing Arabic exposure, the authors find that traditional probes like TS-Guessing and Min-K%++ fail to detect contamination, yet English performance still improves. They propose a new Translation-Aware Contamination Detection (TACD) method that uses cross-lingual consistency and choice reordering to reveal contamination effects that are otherwise invisible to English-only diagnostics.

By Chaymaa Abbas, Nour Shammaa, Mariette Awad
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

Measuring the Tokenization Premium: A Cost Audit for Underserved Language Communities

Large language models are increasingly deployed as general-purpose educational and technical assistance systems, but their underlying infrastructure does not treat languages equally. One underexamined source of disparity is tokenization: semantically equivalent content can require substantially different token counts across languages, affecting API cost, latency, and usable context length before a model is invoked.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Cross-Lingual Legal QA for Vietnamese Labour Law: Retrieval, Translation, and Verifier-Guided Correction

The paper presents a cross‑lingual legal QA system for Vietnamese labour law, introducing a bilingual evaluation suite of 231 Vietnamese–English question–answer pairs, 75 of which are annotated for five complex legal reasoning phenomena. It evaluates a verifier‑guided pipeline that decomposes answers into claims, checks citation reachability and entailment, and corrects citation failures and contradictions, and introduces six automatic diagnostics for faithfulness to retrieved evidence. Experiments show that dense retrieval outperforms sparse and hybrid retrieval, translation placement has no significant effect on diagnostics, and verifier‑guided correction modestly improves citation preservation but not other dimensions, with human evaluation indicating a gap between automatic diagnostics and human judgments.

By Nguyen Minh Chi, Mo El-Haj, Nguyen Ha Thanh, Dawn Knight, Paul Rayson
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Probing Factual Knowledge Transfer with Training Data Interventions

The paper investigates whether multilingual language models transfer factual knowledge from one language to another during continued pretraining. Using an English-pretrained model continued on Persian data with systematically removed facts, the authors create SIFT, a dataset of 500 triples across 20 relations, split by cultural origin. Their findings indicate that factual transfer is minimal, especially for Persian-related facts, and that simple removal strategies or easy negative candidate sets can overestimate transfer.

By Romina Oji, Marc Braun, Marcel Bollmann, Marco Kuhlmann, Jenny Kunz