arXiv Machine Learning

GottBERT: a pure German Language Model

arXiv:2012. 02110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pre-trained language models have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP), especially with the introduction of BERT and its optimized version, RoBERTa.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Parameter-Efficient Retrievers for Polish and European Languages

The paper introduces a three‑stage training pipeline that builds compact, efficient dense retrievers without requiring ground‑truth relevance labels. Using cross‑lingual alignment, relational knowledge distillation, and contrastive fine‑tuning, the authors develop PolDense (six Polish models ranging from 17 M to 1 B parameters) and EuroDense (a 435 M‑parameter model covering nine European languages). Extensive evaluation on 41 Polish and 150 multilingual tasks shows that PolDense‑1B outperforms larger retrievers up to 9 B parameters, while EuroDense leads in task‑averaged and language‑averaged performance among models below 1 B parameters.

By S{\l}awomir Dadas, Rafa{\l} Po\'swiata, Ma{\l}gorzata Gr\k{e}bowiec, Micha{\l} Pere{\l}kiewicz
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

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 Computation and Language
Sep 2

Polish ModernBERT: The Long and Short of Polish Language Understanding

Polish ModernBERT is a new family of encoder‑only Transformers for Polish, offering Base and Large models with both 512‑token and 8K‑token context variants. The authors adapted the ModernBERT pretraining recipe through staged selection experiments and released a long‑context benchmark covering legal topic classification, ideological decision‑direction prediction, factual‑consistency assessment over literary plot summaries, and human‑rights violation assessment. Across 30 tasks, Polish ModernBERT outperforms existing Polish encoders, achieving 83.99 and 85.11 on the Base‑8K and Large‑8K models, respectively, and improving long‑context performance while using fewer parameters and lower memory and latency.

By Micha{\l} Pere{\l}kiewicz, S{\l}awomir Dadas, Rafa{\l} Po\'swiata, Ma{\l}gorzata Gr\k{e}bowiec
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Large Language Model Selection with Limited Annotations

arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...

By Yavuz Durmazkeser, Patrik Okanovic, Andreas Kirsch, Torsten Hoefler, Nezihe Merve G\"urel
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