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Papers

Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

URA-NER: A Unified Retrieval-Augmented Framework with Retrieval Alignment and Uncertainty Reduction for Low-Resource NER

In-context learning (ICL) based on large language models (LLMs) has shown promising potential in alleviating performance bottlenecks caused by the limited availability of annotated data in Named Entity Recognition (NER). However, existing methods still face issues of retrieval misalignment and generation uncertainty, making their performance heavily dependent on the LLM's capabilities. As the parameter scale of LLMs decreases, their performance in few-shot settings deteriorates significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel unified retrieval-augmented framework, URA-NER, including three key components: Progressive Granularity Retrieval (PGR), Model-aware Representation Enhancement (MaRE), and Reason-aware Knowledge Verification. PGR is a two-stage retrieval mechanism that achieves stage alignment. It first retrieves demonstrations for span detection based on the query's global semantics, and then for type classification based on the specific entity context, providing fine-grained local information. Moreover, MaRE employs entity pre-recognition to guide the construction of representations, ensuring the query and demonstrations are aligned within the LLM's semantic space and attention pattern. In addition, to mitigate generation uncertainty, we propose RaKV, a closed-loop "generation-retrieval-verification" process. It explicates the LLM's reasoning paths, leverages them for the retrieval of external knowledge, and reorganizes the knowledge into verification evidence aligned with the original reasoning paths. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple low-resource NER datasets. Results demonstrate that URA-NER significantly enhances the performance of LLMs under low-resource settings, with particularly pronounced gains for smaller LLMs, achieving new state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks.
Jingyu Wang, Shijie Wu, Fusheng Jin
Jun 14, 2026cs.CV

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

In this work, we target Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low-resource scenarios, which arise from underrepresented languages, rare scripts, and degraded visual conditions typical of historical documents. We introduce SCAM (Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts), a new line-level dataset built from digitized ancient manuscripts written in the extinct Sahidic Coptic dialect. The dataset reflects a realistic and challenging setting, as it combines heterogeneous acquisition conditions across libraries with typical manuscript degradations such as ink fading, bleed-through, and material deterioration. In addition to visual complexity, SCAM poses significant linguistic challenges due to the scarcity of resources for Sahidic Coptic, its uncommon alphabet, and dialect-specific diacritics. To support research in low-resource HTR, we benchmark several state-of-the-art approaches based on different paradigms, highlighting their limitations and strengths in this setting. Our results underline the gap between current HTR performance on well-resourced modern scripts and historically grounded, low-resource scenarios, thus providing a reference point for future developments.
Fabio Quattrini, Carmine Zaccagnino, Costanza Bianchi +2
Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

ToneCL: Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot Syllable-Level Tone Classification

Tone languages constitute over 50-70% of the world's languages, but the vast majority are low-resource, lacking the large transcribed corpora needed for automatic tone classification. Existing datasets are typically collected at the sentence level, whereas field linguists require fine-grained syllable-level annotations. We propose ToneCL, a lightweight contrastive learning framework for few-shot syllable-level tone classification. We simulate low-resource conditions on Mandarin and Vietnamese, limiting labeled data to tens of examples per tone class. ToneCL is pretrained on unlabeled speech with augmentations that preserve tonal identity, then fine-tuned on few-shot examples. Experiments show our method consistently outperforms baselines, achieving 91.6% on six-speaker Mandarin at 10 shots. Cross-lingual transfer is also effective: pretraining on Vietnamese and fine-tuning on Mandarin reaches 91.0% accuracy at 10 shots. Ablation confirms that frequency band rejection is the most critical augmentation.
Qisheng Liao, Youngah Do
Aug 6, 2026cs.CL

Decolonizing Linguistic Policies in Automated Speech Recognition: A Framework for Cross-Culturally Competent Speech AI

This paper focuses on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and ASR-mediated voice interfaces that shape access to public services, healthcare, and education. We argue that persistent failures for low-resource, Indigenous, and non-standard language varieties are not only technical errors, but also implicit linguistic policies that reproduce colonial language hierarchies. Drawing on linguistic capital, raciolinguistic ideology, language policy research, and decolonial computing, we show how data, metrics, and model priors determine whose voices become machine-legible. We introduce the Three Harms (3M) taxonomy---Misrecognition, Misalignment, and Mistrust---and a seven-layer situatedness model for linguistic diversity in ASR and ASR-mediated voice interfaces. We then propose a participatory framework and minimum audit protocol for culturally competent ASR, positioning affected communities as co-designers, evaluators, and governance partners.
Jay L. Cunningham, Mark Atta Mensah, Richard Martinez +2
May 19, 2026cs.CL

PromptRad: Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Label Prompt-Tuning for Low-Resource Radiology Report Labeling

Automatic report labeling facilitates the identification of clinical findings from unstructured text and enables large-scale annotation for medical imaging research. Existing rule-based labelers struggle with the diverse descriptions in clinical reports, while fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) requires large amounts of labeled data that are often unavailable in clinical settings. In this paper, we propose PromptRad, a knowledge-enhanced multi-label \textbf{prompt}-tuning approach for \textbf{rad}iology report labeling under low-resource settings. PromptRad reformulates multi-label classification as masked language modeling and incorporates synonyms from the UMLS Metathesaurus into a multi-word verbalizer to enrich category representations. By fine-tuning the PLM without additional classification layers, PromptRad requires substantially less labeled data than conventional fine-tuning. Experiments on liver CT (computed tomography) reports show that PromptRad outperforms dictionary-based and fine-tuning baselines with only 32 labeled training examples, and achieves competitive performance with GPT-4 despite using a much smaller model. Further analysis demonstrates that PromptRad captures complex negation patterns more effectively than existing methods, making it a promising solution for report labeling in data-scarce clinical scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/ila-lab/PromptRad.
Ying-Jia Lin, Tzu-Chin Lo, Ping-Chien Li +3
Jun 22, 2026cs.LG

Unlocking In-Context Learning in Audio-Language Models from Decentralized Medical Audio

Clinical audio diagnosis in low-resource settings requires models that identify conditions from minimal examples without large annotated corpora. We propose Federated Self-Contextualization (FSC), a multimodal language model framework for in-context clinical audio diagnosis across federated hospital clients. FSC constructs pseudo-label episodes via unsupervised clustering of audio representations, bypassing scarce real diagnostic labels, and enables contextual reasoning from support-query pairs. Our progressive three-stage pipeline first aligns audio embeddings with the language model via caption-based pretraining, then adapts it for episodic in-context inference through federated optimization. At test time, given a small labeled support set, the model diagnoses an unseen query through multimodal reasoning. On held-out respiratory and cardiac conditions, FSC achieves 71.6% accuracy in 2-way 2-shot evaluation, outperforming audio-language baselines by over 9%.
Ran Piao, Tsai-Ning Wang, Martijn den Dekker +4
May 17, 2026cs.CL

Mixture of Experts for Low-Resource LLMs

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable efficient model scaling, yet expert routing behavior across underrepresented languages remains poorly understood. We analyze routing dynamics in two architecturally distinct MoE models -- a pure Transformer (Qwen3-30B-A3B) and a hybrid Mamba-Transformer (Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B) -- using Hebrew as a morphologically rich, low-resource testbed. Both pre-trained models exhibit \emph{deep-layer routing collapse}: usage entropy drops sharply in final layers and tokens concentrate on a narrow expert subset, a pattern largely absent for English. Continual pre-training (CPT) on balanced bilingual data substantially corrects this imbalance, increasing entropy and shifting routing toward shared, language-agnostic experts; supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone achieves less complete correction. Extending the analysis to Japanese reveals quantitatively consistent collapse signatures, providing cross-linguistic evidence that the phenomenon is a systematic consequence of pre-training underrepresentation rather than any language-intrinsic property. Routing improvements correlate with consistent downstream benchmark gains, positioning routing entropy and expert specialization as principled diagnostics for multilingual capacity in MoE systems.
Ori Bar Joseph, Smadar Arvatz, Noam Kayzer +2
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

BhashaSutra: A Task-Centric Unified Survey of Indian NLP Datasets, Corpora, and Resources

India's linguistic landscape, spanning 22 scheduled languages and hundreds of marginalized dialects, has driven rapid growth in NLP datasets, benchmarks, and pretrained models. However, no dedicated survey consolidates resources developed specifically for Indian languages. Existing reviews either focus on a few high-resource languages or subsume Indian languages within broader multilingual settings, limiting coverage of low-resource and culturally diverse varieties. To address this gap, we present the first unified survey of Indian NLP resources, covering 200+ datasets, 50+ benchmarks, and 100+ models, tools, and systems across text, speech, multimodal, and culturally grounded tasks. We organize resources by linguistic phenomena, domains, and modalities; analyze trends in annotation, evaluation, and model design; and identify persistent challenges such as data sparsity, uneven language coverage, script diversity, and limited cultural and domain generalization. This survey offers a consolidated foundation for equitable, culturally grounded, and scalable NLP research in the Indian linguistic ecosystem.
Raghvendra Kumar, Devankar Raj, Sriparna Saha
Jul 1, 2026cs.CL

From Monolingual to Multilingual: Evaluating Mamba for ASR in South African Languages

Recent advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) have explored different sequence models, including Conformer-based models and newer state space models such as Mamba. Although prior work has evaluated these architectures in multiple languages, their effectiveness in African languages remains underexplored. In this work, we evaluate Mamba for ASR on seven South African languages. In monolingual experiments, each model is trained on 50 hours of speech per language, and we compare Mamba to a Conformer baseline of similar parameter scale. Mamba achieves similar recognition accuracy to Conformer while using fewer computational resources and training faster. We further evaluate generalization in this setting and find that both models struggle to generalize to speech that is much longer than what they were trained on. We then study multilingual ASR using Mamba models, where the baseline is pooling all languages together. On top of this, we tested three extensions: training with language-family information by adding both language and language-family embeddings as biases to the downsampled acoustic representations, and multitask learning with a CTC ASR objective and a language identification (LID) head. We find that multilingual training consistently improves performance over monolingual training. However, adding explicit language information does not improve in-domain performance but does improve cross-corpus robustness. We conducted ablation studies in low-resource multilingual settings using 5-hour and 10-hour per-language training data, where we observed gains from using language embeddings and further demonstrated that removing or altering them hurt model performance. Lastly, we analysed these embeddings and find that they do not capture linguistic similarity in a typological sense, but instead act as task-specific control vectors.
Jesujoba O. Alabi, Julian Herreilers, Badr M. Abdullah +1
Jul 7, 2026cs.CL

PluraMath: Extending Mathematical Reasoning Evaluation Beyond High-Resource Languages

Mathematical reasoning has become a central task for evaluating and tuning reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing benchmarks remain heavily biased toward high-resource languages, with English and Chinese dominating both pre-training corpora and evaluation suites. The recently released PolyMath (Wang et al., 2025) dataset represents a significant step forward, yet its coverage is still limited to 18 only high-resource languages. To address this gap, we introduce PluraMath, an extension of PolyMath to 18 additional {underrepresented languages spanning 6 language families -- ranging from mid-resource to extreme low-resource settings. We constructed the dataset through a human-curated pipeline, where native speakers thoroughly validated pre-computed translations. Using PluraMath, we then benchmark 27 reasoning LLMs across four model scales -- small, mid-size, large, and closed-source ensembles -- probing the multilingual mathematical reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art models under diverse linguistic conditions. Our fine-grained analysis confirms a persistent gap in mathematical reasoning performance between high-resource and underrepresented languages, with stronger results largely associated with better instruction-following ability. We fully open-source our dataset, data acquisition pipeline, and evaluation framework, with the goal of lowering the barrier to multilingual benchmark development for underrepresented communities.
Daryna Dementieva, Nikolay Babakov, Kathy Hämmerl +14
May 29, 2026cs.CL

Reliable Multilingual Orthopedic Decision Support from Clinical Narratives: Language-Aware Adaptation and Verification-Guided Deferral

Multilingual orthopedic decision support remains challenging in low-resource healthcare settings, where clinical narratives contain specialized terminology, mixed scripts, incomplete evidence, label imbalance and language-dependent documentation patterns. This article presents a reliability-oriented framework for classifying free-text orthopedic notes in English, Hindi and Punjabi. We compare task-aligned multilingual transformer encoders, a task-fine-tuned DistilBERT baseline, zero-shot instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) and a domain-adaptive encoder, IndicBERT-HPA. IndicBERT-HPA augments IndicBERT with language-aware orthopedic adapter heads to support clinically relevant multilingual representation learning. Evaluation extends beyond aggregate accuracy to per-class performance, ROC-AUC, AUPRC, expected calibration error, cross-language stability and robustness under controlled balanced and natural-prevalence distributions. The evaluated zero-shot LLMs remain substantially less effective than task-adapted encoders for closed-set classification, with language-dependent instability. Under natural clinical prevalence, IndicBERT-HPA achieves the strongest overall performance, reaching an averaged Macro-F1 of 0.8792, Macro-AUROC of 0.894 and AUPRC of 0.902. We further implement a deterministic selective-verification layer combining confidence gating, evidence-consistency checking and language-risk screening. On a randomly selected held-out 5,000-record subset, it achieves 84.4% selective accuracy and 0.76 selective Macro-F1 at 72.3% coverage, compared with 71.5% accuracy and 0.65 Macro-F1 for accept-all prediction. These results support reliability-oriented multilingual clinical decision support with explicit deferral.
Danish Ali, Li Xiaojian, Sundas Iqbal +1
Sep 11, 2026cs.LG

Combining Synthetic and Real Data for Low-Resource Historical OCR: A Manchu Case Study

Manchu, now critically endangered, was one of the principal languages of the Qing empire (1636-1912), and its extensive archival record is increasingly digitized but remains difficult to search and analyze at scale. Previous work showed that vision-language models (VLMs) trained only on synthetic Manchu word images can reach 87.4% word accuracy on real Qing manuscripts and prints, leaving a substantial synthetic-to-real gap. This study examines how synthetic and real historical training data should be combined for low-resource OCR. Using 60,000 synthetic and 20,306 real historical word images, we evaluate three pretrained VLMs and a compact convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) under four regimes: synthetic-only, real-only, joint synthetic-real, and sequential synthetic-to-real training, following a common checkpoint-selection and archival evaluation protocol. Introducing real training images raises the leading configurations to between 95.09% and 96.28% word accuracy, while no synthetic-only configuration exceeds 87.92%. Synthetic supplementation substantially improves all three VLMs, whereas its marginal effect for the CRNN is sensitive to the training objective. Joint and sequential training yield broadly similar archival accuracy under the tested practical pipelines. A compact CRNN also reaches the leading performance range once real images are available, showing that model scale alone does not determine recognition accuracy. Finally, complementary errors among strong recognizers allow voting to raise accuracy to 98.27% without additional training, while an eighteenth-century Manchu dictionary provides a principled rule for adjudicating disagreements.
Yan Hon Michael Chung, Hanlin Wang
Jun 21, 2026cs.SD

Neural Speaker Diarization via Multilingual Training: Evaluation on Low-Resource Nepali-Hindi Speech

Speaker diarization, the task of determining "who spoke when" in a multi-speaker recording, is a critical component in applications such as meeting transcription, accessibility tools, and multilingual information retrieval. While end-to-end neural diarization systems have achieved strong performance for English and other high-resource languages, their effectiveness degrades substantially for underrepresented languages where annotated speech data is scarce. This paper investigates speaker diarization for low-resource Nepali-Hindi speech through a multilingual training approach, comparing two modern architectures: EEND with encoder-decoder attractors (EEND-EDA) and EEND with Perceiver-based attractors (DiaPer). Both models are trained on a multilingual corpus combining English speech from LibriSpeech, diverse speaker recordings from VoxCeleb, and separately collected Nepali and Hindi audio, a setup designed to reduce language bias and encourage cross-lingual generalization. We evaluate both models across 2-speaker, 3-speaker, 4-speaker, and mixed-speaker scenarios on LibriSpeech, VoxCeleb, and Nepali-Hindi (NeHi) test sets. DiaPer achieves stronger overall performance than EEND-EDA, particularly in more challenging multi-speaker conditions, obtaining DERs of 3.28%, 2.02%, 4.05%, and 4.76% on NeHi 2-speaker, 3-speaker, 4-speaker, and mixed-speaker settings, respectively, compared to 1.50%, 9.68%, 16.17%, and 11.19% for EEND-EDA. These results demonstrate the viability of Perceiver-based end-to-end neural diarization for low-resource multilingual speech processing.
Samip Neupane, Sandesh Pokhrel, Sandesh Pyakurel +1
Sep 9, 2026cs.SD

Deterministic Prompting for Speaker-Stable Low-Resource Greek TTS

Modern TTS systems approach human quality for high-resource languages but degrade when clean speech data is scarce. Modern Greek exemplifies this, lacking the curated corpora behind state-of-the-art synthesis. We propose a data curation recipe that transforms audiobook recordings into TTS-ready data via WhisperX alignment and filtering. Then we fine-tune Parler-TTS (880M), a prompt-based multilingual model whose pre-training encodes phonetic priors transferable to Greek. During development, we find that LLM-generated style prompts introduce speaker drift at inference. Replacing them with deterministic prompts resolves this, and a speaker-specific LoRA stage trained on 3.5 h of single-speaker data anchors identity while updating ~5% of parameters. Our system achieves WER 10.7% (2.9 above the ASR floor), MOS-I 4.00 (vs. 4.36 human speech), and near-human speaker consistency (MOS-C 4.24 vs. 4.30), showing that robust single-speaker Greek TTS is achievable with limited curated data.
Georgios Syllas, Efthymios Georgiou, Kosmas Kritsis +1
May 15, 2026cs.CL

Few-Shot Large Language Models for Actionable Triage Categorization of Online Patient Inquiries

Online patient inquiries are often informal, incomplete, and written before professional assessment, yet they must still be routed to an appropriate level of clinical follow-up. We study this as a four-class actionable triage task -- self-care, schedule-visit, urgent-clinician-review, or emergency-referral, and ask whether prompted large language models (LLMs) can support such routing under low-resource labeling conditions. Using the public HealthCareMagic-100K corpus, we construct a 300-example human calibrated gold evaluation set, a 700-example auto-labeled silver training set, and a 40-example few-shot pool. We compare Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Biomedical Text Mining (BioBERT) baselines train on silver labels against six prompted LLMs under 0-shot, 4-shot, and 12-shot conditions respectively. Accordingly, we evaluate with macro-F1F_1 alongside safety-aware metrics, including emergency-recall, under-triage rate, and severe under-triage rate. The strongest LLM (Claude Haiku 4.5, 12-shot) reaches macro-F1F_1 0.475, exceeding the best supervised baseline (BioBERT, 0.378) on point estimate, with overlapping confidence intervals. Few-shot prompting and two-model agreement help in label-dependent ways: self-care agreement is reliable, urgent-clinician-review is not. We conclude that LLMs can support triage prioritization and selective human review, but not autonomous deployment.
Liqi Zhou, Jiafu Li
Jun 3, 2026cs.CL

GlossAssist -- A Tool to Simplify Corpus Creation and Study the Effect of NLP Models in Low-Resource Documentation Settings

Interlinear glossed text (IGT) is the standard format for linguistic annotation in language documentation. Producing it manually, however, is often slow and costly. Automated glossing systems have improved substantially in recent years, but adoption among field linguists remains limited. Existing tools are designed to be evaluated rather than used, offering no interpretable path for correction or the incorporation of linguistic expertise back into model behavior. We present GlossAssist, a glossing tool built around the retrieval-based architecture of CWoMP (Contrastive Word-Morpheme Pre-training), which grounds predictions in a mutable lexicon of learned morpheme representations. In conjunction with CWoMP, our system treats each correction by an annotator as part of an active learning setting, which expands the lexicon and improves future predictions without having to retrain the model. In this paper, we present our interface and argue that this feedback loop should be treated as a design requirement for NLP tools aimed at documentary linguists.
Bhargav Shandilya, Matt Buchholz, Alexis Palmer
Sep 7, 2026cs.RO

Measuring Language Transfer in Robot Policies: Adding Greek to a Cosmos3 Vision-Language-Action Policy

Robot foundation models are trained and evaluated predominantly in English, and robot demonstration corpora do not exist for most languages. We study the addition of Greek to an open vision-language-action stack using only machine-rephrased instructions and no architecture changes. The main challenge is measurement rather than translation. Several plausible instruments produce false conclusions: a color-histogram metric rewards noise, a single-goal benchmark scores 84.6% under correct Greek and 82.6% under deliberately wrong instructions, training loss fails to predict Greek success, and single-run comparisons are dominated by seed variation. On a discriminative ninety-task suite with three seeds per arm, a multilingual text tower without Greek demonstrations remains at its wrong-instruction floor, while Greek-only training exceeds its control by at most 2.7 points. Bilingual training yields a consistent 6.7-7.1 point margin over its control and reaches about two fifths of English performance. The policy also overfits the translator's phrasing; training on seven phrasings per task approximately halves this penalty. Warm-starting from a language-adapted world model and unfreezing the text tower both degrade performance. The results support two practical requirements for low-resource robot-policy localization: build a guaranteed null before trusting a metric, and replicate low-resource-language results across seeds.
Ayoub Kirouane, Georgios Giaples, Christos Petrocheilos
May 17, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Catalogue Counts: the Dataset Visibility Asymmetry in Low-Resource Multilingual NLP

Multilingual NLP often relies on dataset counts from centralized catalogues to characterize which languages are resource-rich or resource-poor. However, these catalogues record only one layer of dataset visibility: what has been registered or institutionally distributed. They do not necessarily reflect which datasets are created, cited, or reused in the research literature. To examine this gap, we combine a catalogue-based baseline with literature-backed evidence of dataset circulation. We introduce the Resource Density Index (RDI), defined as the number of catalogued datasets per one million speakers, and compute it for the 200 most widely spoken languages in Ethnologue. Among them, 118 languages (59%) have an average RDI of zero across the LRE Map and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), and another 23 fall below 0.1, corresponding to at most one catalogued dataset per ten million speakers. We then apply an LLM-assisted citation-mining pipeline over the Semantic Scholar corpus to these 141 low-visibility languages. After manual validation and consolidation, we identify 609 unique datasets across 53 languages, of which 356 remain openly accessible through working public links. These results reveal a substantial visibility gap: many large-speaker languages appear data-poor in catalogue records yet show clear evidence of dataset activity in the research literature. Our findings suggest that multilingual data scarcity should be understood not only as a production problem, but also as a question of documentation, discoverability, and long-term accessibility. Code and data are publicly available at (https://github.com/zhiyintan/dataset-visibility-asymmetry).
Zhiyin Tan, Changxu Duan
Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

Assessing Readability with LLMs: The Role of Reasoning and Few-Shot Prompting

Readability assessment is essential for tailoring texts to intended audiences across educational, healthcare, and information retrieval domains. However, traditional readability formulas struggle to generalize across genres and languages, while supervised machine learning models rely on scarce, domain-specific annotated corpora, limiting their applicability--particularly for less-resourced languages. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a highly scalable, multilingual alternative that requires no task-specific training, yet the impact of advanced prompting strategies on their performance remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic benchmark of diverse open-source LLMs for multilingual readability assessment, focusing on the prediction of discrete readability levels required by educational frameworks. In addition to English, we evaluate our approach on a less-resourced language, Slovenian, to establish whether LLMs remain effective in low-resource settings. Specifically, we investigate the influence of explicit reasoning, demonstrating that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reasoning-oriented models yield significant improvements over direct answering. Furthermore, our exploration of few-shot in-context learning reveals that providing just one labelled example per category (1-shot) substantially enhances prediction quality compared to zero-shot settings, with additional examples offering diminishing returns. By comprehensively comparing these approaches against traditional unsupervised metrics and state-of-the-art supervised baselines, we establish the viability of out-of-the-box LLMs as robust, cross-lingual readability assessors.
Raphaël Thieffry, Matej Martinc
Sep 16, 2026cs.CL

Machine Translation between English and Syriac (East Syriac Dialect) using Statistical Machine Learning

UNESCO considers the Assyrian (Syriac) language an endangered language. Although Assyrians speak the language worldwide, the speaking population is uncertain (ranging from 500,000 to 1,500,000). Syriac is also one of the least studied languages in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite advances in Machine Translation (MT) over the past decade, the lack of publicly available corpora and the orthographic complexity of the Syriac script, specifically the Madnkhaya script, have left this language entirely ignored in the computational linguistics literature. This study develops the first phrase-based Statistical MT (SMT) model for English-to-Assyrian MT using the Moses framework. We created a dataset of 38,847 sentence pairs from the complete English and Syriac Bible, merging a pre-existing New Testament dataset with an Old Testament built from scratch through PDF extraction, using custom segmentation scripts and manual alignment review by three bilingual annotators. The Syriac side of the corpus undergoes diacritic removal and Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization to reduce orthographic sparsity before training. We trained and evaluated six models using different configurations and splitting-scheme ratios, language model order, distortion limits, and the inclusion of an Operation Sequence Model. The best-performing configuration achieves a word-level BLEU score of 23.54. Human evaluation by 11 native Assyrian speakers resulted in mean adequacy and fluency scores of 3.42 and 3.34 out of 5, respectively. These results are consistent with comparable low-resource SMT models trained on Biblical corpora for morphologically rich Semitic languages. The corpora, scripts, and trained model are publicly available, providing the research community with the first systematically curated English-Syriac dataset and a reproducible baseline for future MT and broader NLP work on this endangered language.
Hadiana Sliwa, Hossein Hassani
Jun 15, 2026cs.CL

Surpassing Scale by Efficiency: A Compact 135M Parameter Foundational LLM Natively Adapted for the Bangla Language

While the NLP landscape is dominated by multi-billion parameter architectures, their deployment in low-resource, non-Latin scripts remains computationally prohibitive for edge configurations, mobile systems, and decentralized local hardware. This paper presents bangla-smollm-135m, a highly compact 135-million parameter decoder-only foundational model engineered explicitly for high-efficiency language modeling in the Bangla script. By leveraging a deterministic intersect-and-append token merging strategy between TituLLMs and SmolLM2-135M, the model overcomes subword script fragmentation without destabilizing early pretrained parameter states. In zero-shot multi-task benchmark evaluations (PIQA_bn, OpenBookQA_bn, CommonsenseQA_bn, and Bangla_MMLU), bangla-smollm-135m matches or outperforms models twice its size (Gemma-3-270m) and achieves parity with models in the 1B parameter tier. The model is available at rnnandi/bangla-smollm-135m
Rabindra Nath Nandi
Jun 20, 2026cs.CL

Scaling Performance and Low-Resource Annotation with Many-Shot In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition

In-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful alternative to fine-tuning for Named Entity Recognition (NER), achieving strong performance with minimal annotation and no additional training. However, prior work has shown that despite their adaptability, LLMs still lag behind fully supervised models such as fine-tuned BERT in structured tasks like NER. While existing studies on ICL for NER have mainly explored few-shot settings, the potential of scaling to hundreds of demonstrations has not been thoroughly investigated. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of many-shot ICL for NER and further explore its effectiveness in annotating and refining data for low-resource NER tasks. Specifically, we evaluate various LLMs across multiple domains using hundreds of ICL examples and then assess the feasibility of using many-shot ICL as a data annotation framework. Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) scaling to hundreds of in-context examples enables LLMs to match or even surpass the performance of fully supervised BERT models; and (2) using about one hundred human-labeled examples as demonstrations, many-shot in-context annotation can generate high-quality labeled data, leading to approximately 10% absolute F1 improvement over existing state-of-the-art approaches when used to fine-tune BERT on low-resource NER.
Qi Zhang, Fangping Lan, Cornelia Caragea +2
Apr 7, 2025cs.DC

Prima.cpp: Fast 30-70B LLM Inference on Heterogeneous and Low-Resource Home Clusters

On-device inference offers privacy, offline use, and instant response, but consumer hardware restricts large language models (LLMs) to low throughput and capability. To overcome this challenge, we present prima.cpp, a distributed on-device inference system that runs 30-70B LLMs on consumer home clusters with mixed CPUs/GPUs, insufficient RAM/VRAM, slow disks, Wi-Fi links, and heterogeneous OSs. We introduce pipelined-ring parallelism (PRP) to overlap disk I/O with compute and communication, and address the prefetch-release conflict in mmap-based offloading. We further propose Halda, a heterogeneity-aware scheduler that co-optimizes per-device CPU/GPU workloads and device selection under RAM/VRAM constraints. On four consumer home devices, a 70B model reaches 674 ms/token TPOT with <6% memory pressure, and a 32B model with speculative decoding achieves 26 tokens/s. Compared with llama.cpp, exo, and dllama, our proposed prima.cpp achieves 5-17 times lower TPOT, supports fine-grained model sizes from 8B to 70B, ensures broader cross-OS and quantization compatibility, and remains OOM-free, while also being Wi-Fi tolerant, privacy-preserving, and hardware-independent. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenCPIL/prima.cpp.
Zonghang Li, Tao Li, Wenjiao Feng +8
Jun 24, 2026cs.CL

Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Tangkhul--English

We present a study on low-resource machine translation for the Tangkhul-English (nmf-en) language pair. Tangkhul is a severely under-resourced Tibeto-Burman language spoken primarily in Manipur, India, with virtually no prior natural language processing infrastructure. We describe two systems: (1) a primary system based on ByT5-large fine-tuned on 38,336 Tangkhul-English parallel sentence pairs, and (2) a contrastive system based on mT5-small fine-tuned on the same corpus. Our primary ByT5-large system achieves a corpus BLEU score of 39.97, chrF++ of 58.07, BERTScore F1 of 0.8104, and COMET (wmt22-comet-da) of 0.7302 on a held-out test set of 3,856 sentences. We further discuss the orthographic challenges specific to Tangkhul's Latin-script diacritics, the domain bias of our training corpus (which comprises biblical text, stories, and conversational data), and avenues for future improvement through data diversification and domain adaptation.
Chormi Zimik Vashai, Agniva Maiti
May 27, 2026cs.CL

Enhancing BiGRU with a KAN Block for Legal Document Classification and Summarization

This study introduces a novel architecture of KAN-based BiGRU model for the task of classification and summarization of legal documents in a low-resource multilingual setup. In order to tackle problems associated with domain language, the usage of different languages, long dependencies within context, and class imbalance, we employ the dataset composed of legal documents from Bangladesh and taken from Manupatra, which include Bengali, English, and transliterated Bengali languages. Our classification task involves BiGRU model, along with Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) module, while the summarization part utilizes attention-based GRU, combined with a KAN model head. Classification model yields 67.96% of accuracy and 0.65 F1 score; while ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L measures for summarization yield 0.38, 0.23, and 0.31 F1 scores, correspondingly. Ablation study shows that the use of KAN increases classification accuracy from 57.34% to 67.96%. Moreover, our proposed technique is compared to several baselines, including classical ML algorithms and pretrained language models.
Ahmed Faizul Haque Dhrubo, Souvik Pramanik, Most. Aysha Siddika Sumona +4
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

Joint-Centric Dual Contrastive Alignment with Structure-Preserving and Information-Balanced Regularization

We propose HILBERT (HIerarchical Long-sequence Balanced Embedding with Reciprocal contrastive Training), a cross-attentive multimodal framework for learning document-level audio-text representations from long, segmented sequences in low-resource data settings. HILBERT leverages frozen pre-trained speech and language encoders to extract segment-level features, which are aggregated via cross-modal attention and self-attentive pooling to form modality-specific document representations and a joint cross-attentive embedding. To align modalities while preserving modality-specific structure under severe audio-text dimensional imbalance, we introduce a reciprocal dual contrastive objective that simultaneously aligns audio-to-joint and text-to-joint representations, rather than directly contrasting audio and text alone. Two auxiliary regularizers further stabilize long-sequence fusion: a Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) loss that preserves structural consistency between each modality and the joint embedding, and a mutual information balancing loss that prevents dominance of a single modality by equalizing information flow from audio and text into the joint space. For downstream prediction, HILBERT employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) classifier over concatenated audio, text, and joint representations to accommodate heterogeneous label regimes. Extensive evaluation across multiple audio-text backbone combinations demonstrates that HILBERT learns semantically meaningful long-sequence representations and achieves superior performance on highly imbalanced multi-class settings.
Habibeh Naderi, Behrouz Haji Soleimani, Stan Matwin
Mar 26, 2026cs.CL

Automated Gradient-Driven Parameter Sharing for Low-Resource Multilingual Speech-to-Text Translation

In low-resource multilingual speech-to-text translation, uniform architectural sharing across languages frequently introduces representation conflicts that impede convergence. This work proposes a principled methodology to automatically determine layer-specific sharing patterns by mining training gradient information. Our approach employs three distinct analysis strategies: distance-based language clustering, self/cross-task divergence metrics for capacity allocation, and joint factorization coupled with canonical correlation analysis for subspace alignment. Extensive evaluation across four language pairs (using the SeamlessM4T-Medium architecture) demonstrates persistent improvements in translation quality metrics.
Ruiyan Sun, Satoshi Nakamura
Jun 11, 2026cs.CL

ArogyaSutra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Multimodal Medical Reasoning in Indic Languages

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising reasoning capabilities in general domains, yet their performance remains limited in specialized settings such as healthcare, especially in multilingual and low-resource scenarios. This gap is critical in regions like rural India, where patients often express complex medical queries in native Indic languages and rely on multimodal inputs such as medical images. Existing English-centric MLLMs struggle to support such use cases, limiting equitable access to AI-driven healthcare assistance. To address this challenge, we introduce ArogyaBodha, a large-scale multilingual multimodal medical question-answer dataset constructed from eight heterogeneous sources, covering 31 body systems, six imaging modalities, and 21 clinical domains across English and seven major Indian languages. We further propose ArogyaSutra, an actor-critic-based multi-agent framework that integrates tool grounding with dual-memory mechanisms for step-wise, reasoning-aware decision making, and uses stored actor-critic simulation trajectories for distillation. Experiments show that our dataset and framework improve multilingual medical reasoning accuracy across all Indic languages, with ablations validating the contribution of each component. The source code and dataset are available at: https://iitp-cse.github.io/ArogyaSutra/
Tanmoy Kanti Halder, Akash Ghosh, Subhadip Baidya +2
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

JudgeMeNot: Personalizing Large Language Models to Emulate Judicial Reasoning in Hebrew

Despite significant advances in large language models, personalizing them for individual decision-makers remains an open problem. Here, we introduce a synthetic-organic supervision pipeline that transforms raw judicial decisions into instruction-tuning data, enabling parameter-efficient fine-tuning of personalized models for individual judges in low-resource settings. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art personalization techniques across three different tasks and settings. The results show that Causal Language Modeling followed by synthetically generated instruction-tuning significantly outperforms all other baselines, providing significant improvements across lexical, stylistic, and semantic similarity. Notably, our model-generated outputs are indistinguishable from the reasoning of human judges, highlighting the viability of efficient personalization, even in low-resource settings.
Itay Razumenko, Arnon Sturm, Nir Grinberg
Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Multi-Agentic System Leveraging Open-Source LLMs to Mitigate Disinformation Threats

In contemporary societies, the threat of disinformation has reached alarming levels, exacerbated by the proliferation of electronic communication, social media, and advancements in artificial intelligence. As a result, there is an urgent need to develop effective countermeasures to mitigate this menace. However, the sheer scale of the problem renders manual fact-checking and human-based verification inadequate, underscoring the necessity for automated methods to detect and debunk disinformation. This article proposes a novel approach based on a multi-agent system that emulates the decision-making processes of human annotators engaged in disinformation detection tasks. By incorporating a consensus mechanism, diversity in cognition and diversity in knowledge, and also hierarchical structure, inspired by human annotators' behavior, the proposed method achieves superior results compared to individual Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT 4 and GPT 3.5. The system leverages open models (e.g., LLaMA, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek and LLaMA-Nemotron) to ensure greater transparency. The evaluation of the proposed method encompasses datasets in languages with varying resource availability, including English (high-resource), Polish (medium-resource), Slovak (low-resource) and Bulgarian (low-resource). Experiments were conducted on tasks such as direct disinformation detection, identification of texts worthy of verification, and detection of texts containing verifiable factual claims.
Sebastian Kula, Martin Tamajka