Ancient Greek to Modern Greek Machine Translation: A Novel Benchmark and Fine-Tuning Experiments on LLMs and NMT Models

Modern Greek is absent from NVIDIA's Nemotron retrieval models and from major multilingual retrieval benchmarks, despite being important for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in legal, energy, financial, and medical applications. We present an end-to-end adaptation of the Nemotron retrieval stack for Modern Greek, including corpus mining, synthetic supervision, retrieval model training, reranker adaptation, reader fine-tuning, and a new benchmark called HERA. Our study shows that a parameter-free BM25 baseline outperforms several off-the-shelf multilingual dense retrieval models on specialist Greek corpora. After fine-tuning on 65,773 Greek retrieval pairs, a Nemotron 1B embedder improves nDCG@10 from 0.362 to 0.835 and substantially outperforms its unadapted counterpart. The learned language competence transfers to general-domain Greek, although the advantage over BM25 remains domain-dependent. We further adapt a cross-encoder reranker and demonstrate consistent improvements across specialist domains. Finally, we LoRA-tune a Nemotron 30B-A3B mixture-of-experts reader for grounded generation, increasing judged answer correctness from 29.4% to 66.9% while significantly improving faithfulness and citation quality. We also introduce HERA, the first large-scale Greek benchmark for retrieval-augmented generation, and release our adapted models and benchmark to support future research on Greek-language RAG systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially advanced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks. These improvements have been attributed, in part, to their emerging reasoning capabilities, which are enabled by large-scale training and increased model capacity. However, existing LLMs can generate erroneous responses when addressing complex queries that fall outside their training distribution, due to limited internal knowledge or the need for multi-step reasoning. To address these limitations, recent work has introduced large reasoning models (LRMs), which incorporate explicit internal reasoning processes to improve response accuracy. Additionally, state-of-the-art LRMs often comprise hundreds of billions of parameters and require several seconds per inference, even on advanced multi-GPU systems. These characteristics limit their practicality for deployment in conventional computing environments. Meanwhile, NLP research on multilingual LLMs continues to prioritize high-resource languages. However, these models exhibit limited performance in under-resourced languages, primarily due to insufficient language- and culture-specific training data. In this paper, we focus on Modern Greek, for which only a limited number of question answering (QA) datasets have been proposed, most of which are intended for model evaluation. To address this research gap in Greek QA, we make the following contributions: (i) CulturaQA, a high-quality LRM-generated and human-curated dataset, for Greek LLM training and evaluation; (ii) a memory-efficient LLM evaluation framework adaptable to diverse languages and QA tasks; (iii) Maistros 8B, a state-of-the-art open-weights Greek LLM developed via knowledge distillation and fine-tuning on CulturaQA; and (iv) a comprehensive evaluation of nine LLMs across nine human-curated Greek QA datasets.

Modern Greek is a richly inflected language, yet the language models built for it are evaluated mainly on factual knowledge, and no benchmark is dedicated to their inflectional competence. We introduce MORFES (Morphological Open-class Recognition-and-Formation Evaluation Suite), a benchmark of 500 expert-verified items that tests the recognition and production of Greek inflected forms, favoring lower-frequency lemmas so that a correct answer reflects the rule rather than a memorized form. We make it publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/KIEFERSA/MORFES. We evaluate a range of open language models on MORFES, situating them within the rapidly scaling open-weight ecosystem from LLaMA to Qwen3, DeepSeek-R1, Magistral, and Kimi K2, where multilingual coverage grows but grammatical competence in morphologically rich languages remains under-measured. Among them, Sophea-Genesis-1, a model we developed and release as open weights at https://huggingface.co/KIEFERSA/Sophea-Genesis-1, leads on inflectional morphology while matching similarly sized models in general capability.