arXiv Computation and Language By Ireddi Rakshitha, Devavarapu Yashwanth, Ntakirutimana Pierre

KinyaEmbed: Contrastive Sentence Embeddings for Kinyarwanda via Multi-Stage Curriculum Training

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KinyaEmbed is the first sentence‑embedding model specifically designed for Kinyarwanda, built on KinyaBERT‑large and trained through a four‑stage curriculum that incorporates paraphrase pairs, translated MNLI triplets, OPUS‑100 translation pairs, and high‑quality KinyaCOMET pairs. It outperforms existing multilingual embeddings on the SemRel2024‑rw benchmark, achieving a Spearman ψ of 0.7298, and introduces the Wiki‑RW‑STS benchmark of 300 contamination‑free Kinyarwanda sentence pairs. All model checkpoints, filtered pairs, and the new benchmark are publicly released.

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