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:2610.20279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Part-of-speech tagging is a fundamental sequence labeling task and an important component for many downstream natural language processing applications....
The paper presents LMSpell, an empirical study evaluating how different pre‑trained language models (PLMs) perform at spell correction across multiple languages, including low‑resource languages (LRLs). It demonstrates that even relatively small PLMs such as Gemma 3 (270 M parameters) and mBART50, when fine‑tuned on only 5,000 sentences, can surpass rule‑based spell correctors. A case study on Sinhala illustrates the challenges of spell correction for LRLs.
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.
arXiv:2609.09554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. L...
arXiv:2609.36131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sinhala Sandhi splitting recovers the constituent words or morphemes hidden inside a phonologically merged surface form. The task is important for Sinh...
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:2607.00890v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synth...
We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. Large end-to-end Transformer-based ASR models such...
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.