arXiv Computation and Language

COILD: An Indic-Centric Parallel Corpus and Benchmark for Machine Translation Across Indian Languages

COILD is an Indic‑centric parallel corpus that contains over 1.16 million human‑translated and verified sentence pairs across 20 Indian language pairs from four language families. The corpus is sourced from original Indian language materials in eight domains, and a 2,000‑sentence domain‑centric benchmark is provided for consistent multilingual evaluation. Experiments with IndicTrans2‑Distilled and NLLB‑200 show consistent improvements in automatic metrics and human judgments, underscoring the value of high‑quality Indic‑centric data.

arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

EnSiTa - A Trilingual Multi-Domain Parallel Dataset and Benchmark for Domain-Specific Machine Translation

EnSiTa is a trilingual multi‑domain parallel dataset and benchmark for English, Sinhala, and Tamil. It contains human post‑edited training data across seven domains and professionally translated test sets for those domains plus an additional one, all produced through a multi‑year, rigorously quality‑controlled process. The authors use EnSiTa to conduct a comprehensive study of domain‑specific machine translation across six language directions, comparing from‑scratch Transformers, pre‑trained models, and decoder‑only LLMs under various training‑data sizes, model scales, and domain settings.

By Surangika Ranathunga, Nisansa de Silva, Aloka Fernando, Kavindu Warnakulasuriya, Isuru Wijesiri, Menan Velayuthan, Charitha Rathnayaka, Thivaharan Varatharajan, Sajeevi Silva, Piumi Kandanaarachchi, Uthayasanker Thayasivam
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 Computation and Language
Aug 27

Apples to Apples? Towards Comparable Crosslingual Language Model Evaluation

The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.

By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett
arXiv AI
Aug 20

NE-BERT: A Multilingual Language Model for Nine Northeast Indian Languages

NE‑BERT is a multilingual encoder trained on about 8.3 million sentences from nine Northeast Indian languages plus Hindi and English. Using weighted sampling and a custom SentencePiece tokenizer, it achieves significantly lower perplexity than IndicBERT‑V2, MuRIL, and mBERT, and improves tokenization fertility. The model also addresses vocabulary fragmentation in extremely low‑resource languages through aggressive upsampling, and its effectiveness is validated on part‑of‑speech tagging for three of the languages.

By Badal Nyalang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

MultiSynt/MT: Trillion-Token Multi-Parallel Pre-Training Data Translated Across 36 Languages

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...

By Maximilian Idahl, J\"org Tiedemann, Sampo Pyysalo, David Salinas, Tomasz Galica, Shenbin Qian, Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Zihao Li, Anna Lokrantz, Fedor Vitiugin, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Jenna Kanerva, Filip Ginter, Matthias Lindemann, Tim Isbister, Birger Moell, Jonas Lindh, Jan Haji\v{c}, Jenia Jitsev, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen, Gema Ram\'irez-S\'anchez