arXiv Machine Learning

Calibration Language Shapes Block-Influence Pruning in Multilingual Language Models

The study investigates how the calibration distribution used for Block Influence (BI) pruning of Transformer blocks affects multilingual language models. It finds that English-only calibration underestimates late‑layer importance for Indian languages, leading to suboptimal pruning decisions, while a balanced multilingual calibration mitigates perplexity loss in some models but not universally. The results highlight that pruning strategies must be validated for each architecture and language set rather than relying on a single calibration source.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

Lost in Translation: Why Lower Bias Scores Don't Mean Fairer Models

The paper investigates whether lower stereotype bias scores in multilingual language models truly indicate greater fairness. By auditing ten open models across eight languages, the authors show that lower average scores often arise from translation artifacts rather than genuine bias reduction, as item‑level correlations between English and translated scores are weak. They also identify pipeline errors that can mask bias signals and provide code to replicate their findings.

By Harsh Kumar
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Can Classical Semantic-Extractive Summarization Be Evaluated in Hindi? A Replication Study

The study replicates a distributional‑semantics extractive summarisation method for Hindi, adapting all language‑specific components to Devanagari. Evaluated on the Hindi portions of XL‑Sum and FIRE ILSUM 2.0 with a Devanagari‑aware ROUGE scorer, the replicated system performs significantly worse than a simple three‑sentence lead baseline. Feature ablation shows that sentence position alone reproduces the lead baseline, while other features only steer extraction toward long, entity‑dense body sentences, and TextRank performs identically. "whyItMatters":"The results indicate that current Hindi summarisation benchmarks cannot reward non‑lead content selection, highlighting the need for purpose‑built evaluation resources."

By Showket Ahmad Khan, Mudasir Mohd, Nasrullah Sheikh, Mohsin Altaf Wani, Abid Hussain Wani, Hilal Ahmad Khanday, Niyaz Ahmad Wani
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

IndicQE-APE: A Benchmark for Quality Estimation and Automatic Post-Editing for Indic Languages

IndicQE-APE is a consolidated benchmark that unifies quality estimation (QE) and automatic post‑editing (APE) data for nine Indic language pairs, comprising 126,754 instances with multiple aligned labels such as direct assessment, human post‑edit, word‑level OK/BAD tags, and error explanations. The dataset includes a stratified test set across four difficulty axes and supports training and evaluation of six prompted large language models, three COMET metrics, and three APE systems. Experiments reveal that segments with conflicting holistic and token‑level quality signals are consistently ranked lower, while annotator disagreement shows no effect when controlled for score distribution. whyItMatters":"The benchmark provides a unified resource for training and evaluating QE and APE across Indic languages, enabling consistent comparison of models and metrics on a shared dataset."

By Diptesh Kanojia, Archchana Sindhujan, Sourabh Deoghare, Daria Sokova, Shenbin Qian, Girish Koushik, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Constantin Or\u{a}san, Chrysoula Zerva, Ricardo Rei, Fr\'ed\'eric Blain, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Marco Turchi, Matteo Negri, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Mitesh M. Khapra, Pushpak Bhattacharyya