The paper introduces SinLlama, the first decoder‑based open‑source large language model with explicit support for Sinhala. By extending Llama‑3‑8B, adding Sinhala‑specific tokenizer vocabulary, and performing continual pre‑training on a cleaned 10‑million‑token Sinhala corpus, the authors created a model that surpasses both the base and instruction‑fine‑tuned variants of Llama‑3‑8B on three text classification tasks. This work addresses the underrepresentation of low‑resource languages in open‑source LLMs.
arXiv:2608.22922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HelaBERT, a family of two BERT-based masked language models pre-trained from scratch on approximately 1 billion tokens of Sinhala text sourc...
arXiv:2608. 13580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jais 2 is a family of Arabic-centric large language models developed jointly by MBZUAI, Cerebras, and Inception, designed to advance Arabic-centric language modeling, with strong performance across the Arabic and culturally grounded benchmarks evaluated in this report.
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.
arXiv:2607. 23344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Named Entity Recognition (NER) for low-resource languages such as Marathi remains a challenging task due to limited annotated resources and linguistic complexity.
IndicDetect is a benchmark for evaluating AI‑generated text detection in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil. It pairs curated human‑written texts with LLM‑generated counterparts across multiple domains and generators, testing detectors under domain shift, generator shift, and adversarial perturbation. The study shows that supervised neural detectors fail to generalize to unseen generators and attacks, with Hindi experiencing the greatest degradation, indicating that robustness—not peak accuracy—is the main weakness in Indic language detectors.
Sinhala is a morphologically rich abugida spoken by roughly 16 million people in Sri Lanka, and to date, there are no publicly available real-world datasets for page-level Sinhala OCR. All previous studies for assessing Sinhala OCR models have used artificially generated data.
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.
arXiv:2606. 24825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a foundational NLP task underpinning machine translation, information extraction, and syntactic parsing.
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:2608.03446v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform better on non-English classification tasks when the representations of the giv...
arXiv:2608. 15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language-specific competency (LSC) is the phenomenon of a language model performing better or worse depending on the language of the prompt.
arXiv:2608. 03494v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vocabulary extension is an efficient way to adapt pretrained large language models (LLMs) to new languages, but the initialization of newly added token embeddings can strongly affect continued pre-training (CPT) efficiency.