arXiv Computation and Language

KinyaEmbed: Contrastive Sentence Embeddings for Kinyarwanda via Multi-Stage Curriculum Training

KinyaEmbed is the first sentence‑embedding model specifically designed for Kinyarwanda, built on KinyaBERT‑large and trained through a four‑stage curriculum that incorporates paraphrase pairs, translated MNLI triplets, OPUS‑100 translation pairs, and high‑quality KinyaCOMET pairs. It outperforms existing multilingual embeddings on the SemRel2024‑rw benchmark, achieving a Spearman ψ of 0.7298, and introduces the Wiki‑RW‑STS benchmark of 300 contamination‑free Kinyarwanda sentence pairs. All model checkpoints, filtered pairs, and the new benchmark are publicly released.

arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

TabuLM: Morphology-Aware Tabular Pre-training for Low-Resource Languages

TabuLM is a new language model pre‑trained on Kinyarwanda tabular data, extending KinyaBERT‑large with row, column, and cell‑type embeddings and a table‑structure attention bias. It introduces two pre‑training objectives—Masked Cell Recovery and Column Type Prediction—and is trained on 172 Rwandan government tables. On the TabQA‑kin benchmark, TabuLM achieves 62.0% exact match, outperforming KinyaBERT‑large and multilingual baselines by significant margins.

By Ireddi Rakshitha, Devavarapu Yashwanth, Ntakirutimana Pierre
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Embedding Initialization for Unseen Low-resource Languages in Multilingual NMT: A Case Study on Limbum-English Translation

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.

By Samiratu Ntohsi, Neza David Tuyishimire, Anesu Kafesu, Marvin Ogore, Samuel Oluwajunwonlo Babalola, Oche Ankeli
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

MoganColBERT-TR: A Late-Interaction Multi-Vector Retrieval Model for Turkish

MoganColBERT-TR is a Turkish multi‑vector retrieval model that projects token embeddings from 768 to 128 dimensions and uses MaxSim late interaction for scoring. It builds on the previously trained MoganBERT‑TR encoder, adapting it to the ColBERT objective with a single‑epoch distillation phase using cross‑encoder teacher scores. Evaluated on five Turkish BEIR datasets in a zero‑shot setting, it achieves an overall score of 37.36, outperforming larger models on most datasets.

By Furkan Yilmaz, Habibe Aleyna Tasdemir, Muhammed Faruk Gozay
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Teaching Nemotron Greek: Mining a Corpus, Adapting Retrieval, and Grounding Generation for Modern Greek across Specialist Domains

arXiv:2608. 05138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Greek is absent from NVIDIA's Nemotron retrieval models and from major multilingual retrieval benchmarks, despite being important for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in legal, energy, financial, and medical applications.

By Ayoub Kirouane, Christos Petrocheilos
arXiv AI
Jun 12

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

arXiv:2606. 13647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types -- nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak.

By Marek \v{S}uppa, Andrej Ridzik, Daniel Hl\'adek, Nat\'alia K\v{n}a\v{z}ekov\'a, Vikt\'oria Ondrejov\'a
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

LuxIT: A Luxembourgish Instruction Tuning Dataset from Monolingual Seed Data

LuxIT is a monolingual instruction‑tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, created by synthesizing instruction‑answer pairs from native texts using the DeepSeek‑R1‑0528 model and a quality‑assurance LLM‑as‑judge process. The resulting 227,507 high‑quality pairs were used to fine‑tune 14 LLMs (≤15 B parameters), yielding an average accuracy increase of +5.37 percentage points on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and improvements in macro‑averaged F1 on nine of the fourteen downstream NLP tasks. These findings demonstrate that synthetic monolingual data can effectively enhance LLM performance in low‑resource languages and reveal the complex relationship between exam performance and practical NLP gains.

By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

IKS-Instruct: A 24,000-Example Multilingual Dataset for Teaching Language Models Indian Knowledge Systems

arXiv:2607. 23322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction tuning has become the standard method for adapting large language models to follow human intent, yet existing instruction datasets are dominated by English-language general-knowledge tasks and lack coverage of specialized pedagogical domains.

By Shwetha Singaravelu, Gayathri Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran, Santhosh Sivasubramani