The paper challenges the assumption that improving cross‑lingual alignment automatically enhances cross‑lingual transfer. Using XLM‑R models aligned on token, sentence, and masked‑language‑modeling objectives across four language pairs, the authors evaluate zero‑shot transfer on part‑of‑speech tagging and sentence classification. They find that embedding‑based alignment metrics poorly predict downstream performance and that alignment and task gradients are often nearly orthogonal, especially when operating at different representational levels.
By Yana Veitsman, Yihong Liu, Hinrich Sch\"utze
LuxIT is a monolingual instruction‑tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, created by synthesizing instruction‑answer pairs from native texts using the DeepSeek‑R1‑0528 model and a quality‑assurance LLM‑as‑judge process. The resulting 227,507 high‑quality pairs were used to fine‑tune 14 LLMs (≤15 B parameters), yielding an average accuracy increase of +5.37 percentage points on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and improvements in macro‑averaged F1 on nine of the fourteen downstream NLP tasks. These findings demonstrate that synthetic monolingual data can effectively enhance LLM performance in low‑resource languages and reveal the complex relationship between exam performance and practical NLP gains.
By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.
By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
EuroAlpaca presents a task‑preserving localisation pipeline that translates English instruction‑tuning data into 50 European languages while maintaining task‑critical constraints. The method uses field‑wise machine translation or reconstructs task‑equivalent target‑language instances, followed by validation of coherence and consistency. Experiments show that EuroAlpaca improves instruction‑following accuracy by 12.9% over a baseline and outperforms direct translation on ROUGE‑L and F‑BERT metrics.
By Aleix Sant, Jordi Luque, Carlos Escolano
arXiv:2607.00890v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synth...
By Maximilian Idahl, J\"org Tiedemann, Sampo Pyysalo, David Salinas, Tomasz Galica, Shenbin Qian, Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Zihao Li, Anna Lokrantz, Fedor Vitiugin, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Jenna Kanerva, Filip Ginter, Matthias Lindemann, Tim Isbister, Birger Moell, Jonas Lindh, Jan Haji\v{c}, Jenia Jitsev, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen, Gema Ram\'irez-S\'anchez
arXiv:2606. 31718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) for low-resource languages is typically constrained by the lack of annotated corpora.
By Dragos-Mitrut Vasile, Elena-Simona Apostol, Stefan-Adrian Toma, Adrian Paschke, Ciprian-Octavian Truica