arXiv Computation and Language

Adapting Qwen3 to Tajik from 0.6B to 8B: Lower Text Loss Did Not Mean Better Understanding

The paper reports on adapting the Qwen3 language model to Tajik using small LoRA adapters across sizes from 0.6B to 8B. While the adapters consistently lowered Tajik text loss by 0.60 to 1.45 nats per token, they did not improve Tajik reading comprehension on the Belebele benchmark; in some cases accuracy even dropped. A more extensive 8B training pipeline, including 375 million tokens of raw Tajik text and supervised fine‑tuning, produced a new model (e3) that outperformed Qwen3‑8B on Belebele by 11.4 points, though it slightly degraded English MMLU performance.

arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Saidzoda-Tajik-E5-Large: Fine-Tuning a 560M Embedder for Tajik Retrieval

Saidzoda‑Tajik‑E5‑Large is a 560 M‑parameter Tajik text embedder fine‑tuned from multilingual‑e5‑large‑instruct. The authors generated 235,140 question‑passage pairs from Tajik laws, tax documents, Wikipedia and web text, trained for one epoch with hard negatives, and mixed in English and Russian pairs to preserve multilingual performance. On unseen Tajik law and tax passages the model retrieves the correct answer in the top ten for 93.6 % and 94.5 % of questions, respectively, outperforming the base model and matching larger models on similar tasks.

By Tohir Saidzoda, Nekruz Maxudov, Bedil Karimov, Abubakr Abdullozoda, Amin Jalilov, Jonibek Kishvarov, Rahmonali Sharipov, Mariyamkhon Shodyeva
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Saidzoda-Tajik-LFM-2.6B: Adapting a 2.6B Hybrid Model to Tajik Tool Calling, and What Continued Pretraining Takes Away

Saidzoda‑Tajik‑LFM‑2.6B is a 2.6‑billion‑parameter hybrid model adapted for Tajik tool calling. The adaptation uses two stages: LoRA continued pretraining on 1.49 million cleaned Tajik web documents followed by one epoch of supervised fine‑tuning on machine‑translated Tajik tool calls, English tool calls, and Tajik instructions. On a 174‑item Tajik tool‑calling test set, strict full‑call accuracy rises from 20.69 % for the base model to 64.14 %, while English performance remains unchanged; however, continued pretraining removes the native tool‑call format and part of the skill, and the model shows limited general assistant capabilities.

By Tohir Saidzoda, Nekruz Maxudov, Bedil Karimov, Abubakr Abdullozoda, Amin Jalilov, Jonibek Kishvarov, Rahmonali Sharipov, Mariyamkhon Shodyeva
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

English Word Sense Disambiguation in 2026: When the Labels Become the Bottleneck

The paper reports that in English all‑words word sense disambiguation (WSD), the scarcity of high‑quality labels—not the models—has become the limiting factor. The authors introduce lexEN, a human‑adjudicated correction layer over the Maru2022 ALL_NEW benchmark, and SenseBench, a living leaderboard for LLM WSD evaluation. They show that frontier large language models reach about 95 % accuracy on lexEN‑v1, that relabeling corpora with these models improves downstream systems, and that fine‑grained WordNet senses are often ill‑posed, with coarsening improving both annotator agreement and model performance. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that improving label quality and managing annotation costs are now the critical challenges for advancing WSD performance, as model accuracy is already near its theoretical ceiling."

By Vassili Philippov, Amro Salman, Dmitrii Andreev, Penny Hands, Emil Kaiumov, Pavel Katunin, Anton Nikolaev
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Intrinsic Sequence-Likelihood Confidence in Retrieval-Dominated Extractive QA: Two Pre-Specified Negatives, and What They Do and Do Not Attribute

The paper investigates whether confidence signals from fine‑tuned large language models can improve extractive question answering that relies heavily on retrieval. Experiments on four 7‑9B model families show that retrieval alone recovers 92–99.8% of the best possible accuracy, leaving little room for confidence‑based routing or adaptation to help. The sequence‑likelihood confidence metric, even after recalibration or temperature scaling, fails to provide a statistically significant benefit across different correctness criteria and answer lengths, and the study ultimately offers a set of pre‑specified negatives with explicit dependencies as its main contribution.

By Gunwoo Lee, Changmin Sung, Sang-Hwan Gwak, Ina Kim, Ji-Young Choi, Kyong-Ha Lee
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

MetroLLM-Bench: Evaluating Language Models as Transit Kiosk Runtimes

MetroLLM-Bench is a 955‑case benchmark designed to evaluate language models as the policy layer of transit kiosks across six real metro systems, covering routing, fare calculation, disruptions, accessibility, and adversarial input. The benchmark includes 14 deterministic scoring components (Tier 1) and 8 semantic‑quality components (Tier 2), with a 75/25 split for training‑data generation and held‑out evaluation. Twenty‑six models from six vendors were tested, and a 4B Qwen 3.5 student fine‑tuned via PEFT outperformed GPT‑5.6 on Tier 1 and matched GPT‑5.4 on the combined score, while larger models offered no further improvement.

By Remco Hendriks (Continker)
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