BLiMPPI is a multilingual benchmark comprising over 12,000 minimal pairs for negative polarity items (NPIs) across 33 languages. It is constructed by extracting NPIs from Universal Dependencies treebanks, labeling their licensing contexts, and generating minimal pair perturbations. The study evaluates 12 multilingual and 2 monolingual language models, revealing that multilingual models perform poorly on low‑resource languages and on pairs that cannot be solved by simple n‑gram patterns, while also exploring how NPI typology, language family, licensing variability, and NPI‑licenser distance affect performance.
By Arzu Burcu G\"uven, Anna Rogers, Leonie Weissweiler, Joakim Nivre, Rob van der Goot
arXiv:2605. 02608v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer-based models achieve state-of-the-art dependency parsing for high-resource languages, yet their advantage over simpler architectures in low-resource settings remains poorly understood.
By Kevin Guan, Happy Buzaaba, Christiane Fellbaum
arXiv:2610.08851v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Quantifying language distance among closely related languages remains a core challenge in quantitative linguistics. Our previous work [1] introduced Qu...
By Yiping Bai
arXiv:2606. 12708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP.
By Happy Buzaaba, Cheikh Mouhamadou Bamba Dione, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Sylvain Kahane, Kim Gerdes, Bruno Guillaume, Kevin Guan, Aremu Anuoluwapo, Naome A. Etori, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Utitofon Inyang, Peter Nabende, David Sabiiti Bamutura, Andiswa Bukula, Chinedu Uchechukwu, Rooweither Mabuya, Idris Akinade, Christiane Fellbaum
arXiv:2610.16837v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Syntactic language models (SLMs) that generate sentences along with their syntactic tree structures have shown promise in both syntactic generalizati...
By Pengcheng Wang, Zhexuan Zhang, Chao Lou, Kewei Tu
The paper introduces MADARTB, the first large-scale parallel Arabic dependency treebank covering five city dialects—Beirut, Cairo, Doha, Rabat, and Tunis—alongside Modern Standard Arabic. It contains 5,000 sentences annotated with the CATiB dependency scheme and shows that while overall construction profiles are similar across varieties, local syntactic structures often diverge, indicating significant structural variation. A supervised parser achieves 87.5% LAS, outperforming the best LLM setup at 85.7% LAS across all six varieties, and the authors release the annotations and models publicly.
By Noor Abo Mokh, Mohamed Adel, Jamila El-Gizuli, Go Inoue, Ahmed Elshabrawy, Nizar Habash