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.
By Raphael Scheible, Johann Frei, Fabian Thomczyk, Henry He, Patric Tippmann, Jochen Knaus, Victor Jaravine, Frank Kramer, Martin Boeker
The paper investigates whether multilingual language models transfer factual knowledge from one language to another during continued pretraining. Using an English-pretrained model continued on Persian data with systematically removed facts, the authors create SIFT, a dataset of 500 triples across 20 relations, split by cultural origin. Their findings indicate that factual transfer is minimal, especially for Persian-related facts, and that simple removal strategies or easy negative candidate sets can overestimate transfer.
By Romina Oji, Marc Braun, Marcel Bollmann, Marco Kuhlmann, Jenny Kunz
arXiv:2607. 22662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-web corpora curated via highly selective filters, such as FineWeb-Edu and DCLM, constitute the core of LLM pretraining data and have significantly advanced LLM performance.
By Peiguang Li, Yongwei Zhou, Juncheng Diao, Yuchun Fan, Jian Yang, Jianxiao Yang, Zhongda Su, Shuguang Jiao, Xiao Wei, Zhiye Zou, Gan Dong, Zhizhao Zeng, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai
The paper compares generative and encoder-based neural models for multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) across the eleven languages of the Naamapadam benchmark. Five classic model families, four decoder-only large language models fine‑tuned with LoRA and 4‑bit NF4 quantisation, and nine generative models in zero‑to‑5‑shot inference were evaluated under strict CoNLL span‑level metrics. Encoder-based models (mBERT and XLM‑R) achieved substantially higher F1 scores—up to 0.675 on Hindi—than any generative architecture, with gaps of 7.5–40 percentage points; the best few‑shot result reached only 28% of the encoder baseline. The study identifies three language clusters (encoder‑dominant, partial‑coverage, and failure‑zone) and offers deployment guidelines based on transfer learning and low‑resource NLP principles.
By Jakkala Mahesh, Jatavath Shravan Kumar, Komalla Shivani, Sujoy Sarkar
arXiv:2609.25298v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Cultural evaluation coverage and robustness in language models are difficult to diagnose because pretraining corpora and cultural benchmarks are rarely...
By Yusser Al Ghussin, Eva Gavaller, Cristina Espa\~na-Bonet, Josef van Genabith, Simon Ostermann
The paper introduces TokenAdapt, a model‑agnostic tokenizer transplantation method that uses a hybrid heuristic to initialize new token embeddings, and a novel pre‑tokenization learning approach for multi‑word Supertokens to improve compression. TokenAdapt combines local subword decomposition and global semantic similarity to preserve semantics while reducing retraining needs. Empirical results show that TokenAdapt outperforms existing baselines such as Transtokenizer and ReTok, achieving lower perplexity ratios and significant compression gains.
By Shaurya Sharthak, Vinayak Pahalwan, Adithya Kamath, Adarsh Shirawalmath