arXiv:2607. 29355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer is central to low-resource machine translation, but its behavior within closely related language families remains insufficiently characterized.
arXiv:2607. 04814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale.
The paper investigates weight‑space merging of independently fine‑tuned multilingual machine translation models. Experiments show that merging is more successful when models share a target language, yet it still cannot match the peak performance of language‑specific checkpoints. When target languages differ, performance drops sharply, and analysis reveals that overlapping neuron activation and incompatible upper‑layer geometries cause these failures.
arXiv:2510.27183v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The URIEL+ linguistic knowledge base supports multilingual research by encoding languages through geographic, genetic, and typological vectors. How...
The study evaluates how different input representations—orthographic text, IPA transcription, and romanization—affect cross‑lingual transfer in autoregressive multilingual language models. Across three model sizes and eight languages grouped into typologically motivated pairs, romanized pretraining consistently outperforms native orthography and IPA, especially as model scale increases. Fine‑tuning a text‑pretrained model on romanized data can harm performance on languages already covered by the base model, suggesting romanization should be integrated at pretraining rather than applied later.
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate synthetic data for low‑resource machine translation, focusing on Romansh, which has six distinct varieties. It finds that LLMs are better at translating from Romansh to a high‑resource language (German) than the reverse, creating an asymmetry that makes the direction of data augmentation critical. By generating synthetic translations into German rather than Romansh, the authors surpass a Gemini 3 Pro baseline on German‑Romansh translation, achieving a +23 BLEU improvement in the lowest‑resource variety and producing fluent translations in each Romansh variety according to human evaluation.
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.
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.
The paper investigates how multilingual large language models can unintentionally switch languages during generation. It compares three techniques—ValSel, FreqSel, and AnnSel—for pinpointing latent variables that control language choice in cross‑layer transcoders. Using new multilingual benchmarks and targeted interventions on Gemma‑2‑2B and Qwen3‑4B, the study finds all methods can steer output language, with FreqSel performing best and AnnSel providing interpretable selections via explicit annotations.
arXiv:2606. 18033v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer in multilingual NLP has been widely explored in supervised fine-tuning contexts, where factors like data availability and linguistic similarity largely determine transfer quality.
arXiv:2609.15079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM architectures, such as LangChain and AutoGen, largely assume English as the lingua franca for internal inter-agent communication, eve...
Low-resource languages remain challenging for machine translation, and Mongolian is a representative case. As a digraphic language, Mongolian is written in both Cyrillic and Traditional scripts, which exhibit a severe imbalance in data availability.
The study evaluates Arabic–Russian machine translation by comparing seven fine‑tuned neural machine translation (NMT) models with four few‑shot large language models (LLMs) on a new 15.47 million‑pair corpus split into 20k/5k/5k. Fine‑tuned NLLB‑1.3B achieves the best performance (BLEU 16.3, COMET 0.738), while the best few‑shot LLM, Aya‑Expanse 8B, scores only BLEU 1.7 on 500 sentences. Error analysis shows that low lexical overlap between Arabic and Russian is the main source of failures, and statistical tests confirm significant performance gaps between most models.