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Pearl-Chat is an 8.5‑million‑parameter causal decoder‑only transformer built from first principles in JAX and Flax NNX, specifically engineered for the low‑resource Bantu language Luganda. It uses a byte‑level BPE tokenizer trained from scratch on curated Luganda corpora, achieving a two‑fold compression improvement over larger models like LLaMA‑3 and Gemma. The model is trained in two stages—pre‑training on diverse Luganda text and instruction fine‑tuning on dialogues—reaching a validation perplexity of 1.20 and high ROUGE‑L and BLEU scores on a held‑out diagnostic benchmark, with all weights, tokenizers, and code released openly.
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.
We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2. 0 self-supervised speech encoder.
arXiv:2606. 24460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token.
arXiv:2606. 20089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persian pretrained language models (PLMs) are still limited by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality pretraining corpora and by insufficient evaluation beyond standard classification and NER tasks.
MoVoC introduces a morphology-aware subword construction method for Ge'ez script languages, integrating supervised morphological analysis with Byte Pair Encoding to preserve morphological boundaries while retaining lexical meaning. The resulting MoVoC-Tok tokenizer outperforms baselines in MorphScore and morpheme boundary precision across several low-resource, morphologically complex languages, notably achieving significant gains on Tigre through cross-lingual application. The authors also release morpheme-annotated datasets and a morpheme-aware vocabulary for public use.