Natural language processing

Classical and neural NLP: translation, question answering, tokenization and the evaluation of language understanding.

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arXiv AI
Sep 1

LightNav-0: Eliciting VLM Spatial Intelligence for Generalist Embodied Navigation

arXiv:2608.30935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied navigation requires agents to translate heterogeneous goals and visual observations into actions across tasks, environments, and robot embod...

By Shaoan Wang, Aocheng Luo, Fei Huang, Jingyi Xu, Xiaoyang Wang, Yueyu Wang, Qianli Ma, Fan Yang, Ran Mei, Jia Wei, Jiangpeng Hu, Xuhao Liu, Hongming Chen, Yuanbin Shao, Yiyang Lin, Ziliang Li, Liang Pan, Xinhang Liu, Yuntao Ma, Tingxiang Fan
arXiv AI
Sep 1

A rigor-matched audit of periodic-step layer skipping for efficient llm inference: conflayers versus swift, with a supplemental analysis of trained routing alternatives

The paper presents a rigor‑matched audit comparing two periodic‑step, search‑based layer‑skipping methods for efficient large language model inference: a confidence‑gated early‑exit baseline (ConfLayers) and a self‑speculative decoding approach (SWIFT). Across two Qwen2.5 model scales and tasks (GSM8K reasoning and CNN/DailyMail summarization), SWIFT consistently outperforms ConfLayers in accuracy and, after separating search overhead, achieves faster true inference speed in most settings. The study also evaluates two trained‑routing methods (LayerRoute and LayerDrop), finding modest speedups but significantly lower accuracy, especially for LayerRoute on GSM8K at 1.5B.

By Prateek Kumar Sikdar, Arpan Ghosh
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Manac\'a-1B: An Open, Reproducible Brazilian-Portuguese Language Model and a Tokenizer-Aware, Paired Evaluation

Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.

By Bruno Leonardo Santos Menezes, Carlos Leonardo Souza Cardoso, Fabio Andre Machado Porto
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Generative vs. Encoder Models for Multilingual NER: A Comprehensive Empirical Study on Naamapadam

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 Computation and Language
Sep 1

IndicQE-APE: A Benchmark for Quality Estimation and Automatic Post-Editing for Indic Languages

IndicQE-APE is a consolidated benchmark that unifies quality estimation (QE) and automatic post‑editing (APE) data for nine Indic language pairs, comprising 126,754 instances with multiple aligned labels such as direct assessment, human post‑edit, word‑level OK/BAD tags, and error explanations. The dataset includes a stratified test set across four difficulty axes and supports training and evaluation of six prompted large language models, three COMET metrics, and three APE systems. Experiments reveal that segments with conflicting holistic and token‑level quality signals are consistently ranked lower, while annotator disagreement shows no effect when controlled for score distribution. whyItMatters":"The benchmark provides a unified resource for training and evaluating QE and APE across Indic languages, enabling consistent comparison of models and metrics on a shared dataset."

By Diptesh Kanojia, Archchana Sindhujan, Sourabh Deoghare, Daria Sokova, Shenbin Qian, Girish Koushik, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Constantin Or\u{a}san, Chrysoula Zerva, Ricardo Rei, Fr\'ed\'eric Blain, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Marco Turchi, Matteo Negri, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Mitesh M. Khapra, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
arXiv AI
Sep 1

ImageEval 2026: Culturally Grounded Arabic Multimodal Evaluation

arXiv:2608.30475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an overview of the ImageEval 2026 shared task on culturally grounded Arabic multimodal evaluation. It includes two tasks: (i) AynVQA, cove...

By Samir Abdaljalil, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Ahlam Bashiti, Farina Amir, Md Arid Hasan, Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Zien Sheikh Ali, Erchin Serpedin, Hasan Kurban, Mustafa Jarrar, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam