Low-Resource Language Processing

Latest papers 342

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.
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

Hard to Be Heard: Phoneme-Level ASR Analysis of Phonologically Complex, Low-Resource Endangered Languages

We present a phoneme-level analysis of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for two low-resourced and phonologically complex East Caucasian languages, Archi and Rutul, based on curated and standardized speech-transcript resources totaling approximately 50 minutes and 1 hour 20 minutes of audio, respectively. Existing recordings and transcriptions are consolidated and processed into a form suitable for ASR training and evaluation. We evaluate several state-of-the-art audio and audio-language models, including wav2vec2, Whisper, and Qwen2-Audio. For wav2vec2, we introduce a language-specific phoneme vocabulary with heuristic output-layer initialization, which yields consistent improvements and achieves performance comparable to or exceeding Whisper in these extremely low-resource settings. Beyond standard word and character error rates, we conduct a detailed phoneme-level error analysis. We find that phoneme recognition accuracy strongly correlates with training frequency, exhibiting a characteristic sigmoid-shaped learning curve. For Archi, this relationship partially breaks for Whisper, pointing to model-specific generalization effects beyond what is predicted by training frequency. Overall, our results indicate that many errors attributed to phonological complexity are better explained by data scarcity. These findings demonstrate the value of phoneme-level evaluation for understanding ASR behavior in low-resource, typologically complex languages.
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

Efficient Low-Resource Language Adaptation via Multi-Source Dynamic Logit Fusion

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to low-resource languages (LRLs) is constrained by the scarcity of task data and computational resources. Although Proxy Tuning offers a logit-level strategy for introducing scaling effects, it often fails in LRL settings because the large model's weak LRL competence might overwhelm the knowledge of specialized smaller models. We thus propose TriMix, a test-time logit fusion framework that dynamically balances capabilities from three different sources: LRL competence from a continually pretrained small model, task competence from high-resource language instruction tuning, and the scaling benefits of large models. It is data- and compute-efficient, requiring no LRL task annotations, and only continual pretraining on a small model. Experiments across four model families and eight LRLs show that TriMix consistently outperforms single-model baselines and Proxy Tuning. Our analysis reveals that prioritizing the small LRL-specialized model's logits is crucial for success, challenging the prevalent large-model-dominant assumption.
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

ltzGLUE: Luxembourgish General Language Understanding Evaluation

This paper presents ltzGLUE, the first Natural Language Understanding (NLU) benchmark for Luxembourgish (LTZ) based on the popular GLUE benchmark for English. Although NLU tasks are available for many European languages nowadays, LTZ is one of the official national languages that is often overlooked. We construct new tasks and reuse existing ones to introduce the first official NLU benchmark and accompanying evaluation of encoder models for the language. Our tasks include common natural language processing tasks in binary and multi-class classification settings, including named entity recognition, topic classification, and intent classification. We evaluate various pre-trained language models for LTZ to present an overview of the current capabilities of these models on the LTZ language.
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for the Nepali Legal Domain Question Answering

Legal domains in high-resource languages like English have widely adopted artificial intelligence for legal question answering. However, data scarcity in low resource languages such as Nepali has limited the training of large language models on Nepali legal texts. This study presents the first application of a Retrieval Augmented Generation based model for Nepali legal question answering using case laws extracted from the Nepal Kanun Patrika digital archive. Using BM25 on chunked documents, the approach achieved a top precision at one of 91 percent, and up to 75 percent with the multilingual E5 large model. Evaluation of generated answers showed 74 percent groundedness, 85 percent truthfulness according to an automated judge model, and 84 percent human evaluated truthfulness when using BM25 document retrieval, with a 92 percent successful answer generation rate. These results demonstrate that the RAG pipeline can effectively address the gap in legal question answering for low resource languages and provide a foundation for reliable AI systems in the Nepali legal domain.
Apr 18, 2026cs.CL

No One Fits All: From Fixed Prompting to Learned Routing in Multilingual LLMs

Translation-based prompting is widely used in multilingual LLMs, yet its effectiveness varies across languages and tasks. We evaluate prompting strategies across ten languages of different resource levels and four benchmarks. Our analysis shows that no single strategy is universally optimal. Translation strongly benefits low-resource languages even when translation quality is imperfect, high-resource languages gain little, and prompt-based self-routing underperforms explicit translation. Motivated by these findings, we formulate prompting strategy selection as a learned decision problem and introduce lightweight classifiers that predict whether native or translation-based prompting is optimal for each instance. The classifiers achieve statistically significant improvements over fixed strategies across four benchmarks and generalize to unseen task formats not observed during training. Further analysis reveals that language resource level, rather than translation quality alone, determines when translation is beneficial.
Apr 16, 2026cs.CL

Comparison of Modern Multilingual Text Embedding Techniques for Hate Speech Detection Task

Online hate speech and abusive language pose a growing challenge for content moderation, especially in multilingual settings and for low-resource languages such as Lithuanian. This paper investigates to what extent modern multilingual sentence embedding models can support accurate hate speech detection in Lithuanian, Russian, and English, and how their performance depends on downstream modeling choices and feature dimensionality. We introduce LtHate, a new Lithuanian hate speech corpus derived from news portals and social networks, and benchmark six modern multilingual encoders (potion, gemma, bge, snow, jina, e5) on LtHate, RuToxic, and EnSuperset using a unified Python pipeline. For each embedding, we train both a one class HBOS anomaly detector and a two class CatBoost classifier, with and without principal component analysis (PCA) compression to 64-dimensional feature vectors. Across all datasets, two class supervised models consistently and substantially outperform one class anomaly detection, with the best configurations achieving up to 80.96% accuracy and AUC ROC of 0.887 in Lithuanian (jina), 92.19% accuracy and AUC ROC of 0.978 in Russian (e5), and 77.21% accuracy and AUC ROC of 0.859 in English (e5 with PCA). PCA compression preserves almost all discriminative power in the supervised setting, while showing some negative impact for the unsupervised anomaly detection case. These results demonstrate how modern multilingual sentence embeddings combined with gradient boosted decision trees provide robust soft-computing solutions for multilingual hate speech detection applications.
Apr 14, 2026cs.CL

English is Not All You Need: Systematically Exploring the Role of Multilinguality in LLM Post-Training

Despite the widespread multilingual deployment of large language models, post-training pipelines remain predominantly English-centric, contributing to performance disparities across languages. We present a systematic, controlled study of the interplay between training language coverage, model scale, and task domain, based on 220 supervised fine-tuning runs on parallel translated multilingual data mixtures spanning mathematical reasoning and API calling tasks, with models up to 8B parameters. We find that English-only post-training is typically suboptimal: incorporating even a single non-English language improves both English performance and cross-lingual generalization. Increasing language diversity during post-training generally yields further gains, particularly for low-resource languages, while performance on high-resource languages tends to plateau rather than degrade. Moreover, greater language diversity enables strong zero-shot transfer to unseen languages, reducing the need for direct inclusion, though gains remain limited for typologically distant, low-resource languages.
Apr 9, 2026cs.CL

AfriVoices-KE: A Multilingual Speech Dataset for Kenyan Languages

AfriVoices-KE is a large-scale multilingual speech dataset comprising approximately 3,000 hours of audio across five Kenyan languages: Dholuo, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Maasai, and Somali. The dataset includes 750 hours of scripted speech and 2,250 hours of spontaneous speech, collected from 4,777 native speakers across diverse regions and demographics. This work addresses the critical underrepresentation of African languages in speech technology by providing a high-quality, linguistically diverse resource. Data collection followed a dual methodology: scripted recordings drew from compiled text corpora, translations, and domain-specific generated sentences spanning eleven domains relevant to the Kenyan context, while unscripted speech was elicited through textual and image prompts to capture natural linguistic variation and dialectal nuances. A customized mobile application enabled contributors to record using smartphones. Quality assurance operated at multiple layers, encompassing automated signal-to-noise ratio validation prior to recording and human review for content accuracy. Though the project encountered challenges common to low-resource settings, including unreliable infrastructure, device compatibility issues, and community trust barriers, these were mitigated through local mobilizers, stakeholder partnerships, and adaptive training protocols. AfriVoices-KE provides a foundational resource for developing inclusive automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech systems, while advancing the digital preservation of Kenya's linguistic heritage.
Apr 4, 2026cs.CL

Unveiling Language Routing Isolation in Multilingual MoE Models for Interpretable Subnetwork Adaptation

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models exhibit striking performance disparities across languages, yet the internal mechanisms driving these gaps remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of expert routing patterns in MoE models, revealing a phenomenon we term Language Routing Isolation, in which high- and low-resource languages tend to activate largely disjoint expert sets. Through layer-stratified analysis, we further show that routing patterns exhibit a layer-wise convergence-divergence pattern across model depth. Building on these findings, we propose RISE (Routing Isolation-guided Subnetwork Enhancement), a framework that exploits routing isolation to identify and adapt language-specific expert subnetworks. RISE applies a tripartite selection strategy, using specificity scores to identify language-specific experts in shallow and deep layers and overlap scores to select universal experts in middle layers. By training only the selected subnetwork while freezing all other parameters, RISE substantially improves low-resource language performance while preserving capabilities in other languages. Experiments on 10 languages demonstrate that RISE achieves target-language F1 gains of up to 10.85% with minimal cross-lingual degradation.
Mar 30, 2026cs.CL

\textit{Versteasch du mi?} Computational and Socio-Linguistic Perspectives on GenAI, LLMs, and Non-Standard Language

The design of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been shown to be "unfair" to less-spoken languages (Petrov et al., 2023) and to deepen the digital language divide (Bella et al., 2023). Critical sociolinguistic work has also argued that these technologies are not only made possible by prior sociohistorical processes of linguistic standardisation, often grounded in European nationalist and colonial projects (Migge and Schneider, 2025), but also exacerbate epistemologies of language as "monolithic, monolingual, syntactically standardized systems of meaning" (Schneider, 2024, p. 5). In our paper, we draw on earlier work on the intersections of technology and language policy (Kelly-Holmes, 2019) and bring our respective expertise in critical sociolinguistics and computational linguistics to bear on an interrogation of these arguments. We take two different complexes of non-standard linguistic varieties in our respective repertoires-South Tyrolean dialects, which are widely used in informal communication in South Tyrol, Italy (Alber et al., 2024), as well as varieties of Kurdish-as starting points to an interdisciplinary exploration of the intersections between GenAI and linguistic variation and standardisation. We discuss both how LLMs can be made to deal with non-standard language from a technical perspective, and whether, when or how this can contribute to "democratic and decolonial digital and machine learning strategies" (Migge and Schneider, 2025, p. 12), which has direct policy implications.
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.
Mar 22, 2026cs.CL

Benchmarking Bengali Dialectal Bias: A Multi-Stage Framework Integrating RAG-Based Translation and Human-Augmented RLAIF

Large language models (LLMs) frequently exhibit performance biases against regional dialects of low-resource languages. However, frameworks to quantify these disparities remain scarce. We propose a two-phase framework to evaluate dialectal bias, operationalized as comprehension degradation relative to standard Bengali, in LLM question-answering across nine Bengali dialects. First, we translate and gold-label standard Bengali questions into dialectal variants adopting a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline to prepare 4,000 question sets. Since traditional translation quality evaluation metrics fail on unstandardized dialects, we evaluate fidelity using an LLM-as-a-judge, which human correlation confirms outperforms legacy metrics. Second, we benchmark 19 LLMs across these gold-labeled sets, running 68,395 RLAIF evaluations validated through multi-judge agreement and human fallback. Our findings reveal severe performance drops linked to linguistic divergence. For instance, responses to the highly divergent Chittagong dialect score 5.44/10, compared to 7.68/10 for Tangail. Furthermore, increased model scale does not consistently mitigate this bias. We contribute a validated translation quality evaluation method, a rigorous benchmark dataset, and a Critical Bias Sensitivity (CBS) metric for safety-critical applications.
Mar 19, 2026cs.CL

DiscoPhon: Benchmarking the Unsupervised Discovery of Phoneme Inventories With Discrete Speech Units

We introduce DiscoPhon, a multilingual benchmark for evaluating unsupervised phoneme discovery from discrete speech units. DiscoPhon covers 6 dev and 6 test languages, chosen to span a wide range of phonemic contrasts. Given only 10 hours of speech in a previously unseen language, systems must produce discrete units that are mapped to a predefined phoneme inventory, through either a many-to-one or a one-to-one assignment. The resulting sequences are evaluated for unit quality, recognition and segmentation. We provide four pretrained multilingual HuBERT and SpidR baselines, and show that phonemic information is available enough in current models for derived units to correlate well with phonemes, though with variations across languages.
Mar 18, 2026cs.CL

CWoMP: Morpheme Representation Learning for Interlinear Glossing

Interlinear glossed text (IGT) is a standard notation for language documentation which is linguistically rich but laborious to produce manually. Recent automated IGT methods treat glosses as character sequences, neglecting their compositional structure. We propose CWoMP (Contrastive Word-Morpheme Pretraining), which instead treats morphemes as atomic form-meaning units with learned representations. A contrastively trained encoder aligns words-in-context with their constituent morphemes in a shared embedding space; an autoregressive decoder then generates the morpheme sequence by retrieving entries from a mutable lexicon of these embeddings. Predictions are interpretable--grounded in lexicon entries--and users can improve results at inference time by expanding the lexicon without retraining. We evaluate on diverse low-resource languages, showing that CWoMP outperforms existing methods while being significantly more efficient, with particularly strong gains in extremely low-resource settings.
Mar 16, 2026cs.CL

Indirect Question Answering in English, German and Bavarian: A Challenging Task for High- and Low-Resource Languages Alike

Indirectness is a common feature of daily communication, yet is underexplored in NLP research for both low-resource as well as high-resource languages. Indirect Question Answering (IQA) aims at classifying the polarity of indirect answers. In this paper, we present two multilingual corpora for IQA of varying quality that both cover English, Standard German and Bavarian, a German dialect without standard orthography: InQA+, a small high-quality evaluation dataset with hand-annotated labels, and GenIQA, a larger training dataset, that contains artificial data generated by GPT-4o-mini. We find that IQA is a pragmatically hard task that comes with various challenges, based on several experiment variations with multilingual transformer models (mBERT, XLM-R and mDeBERTa). We suggest and employ recommendations to tackle these challenges. Our results reveal low performance, even for English, and severe overfitting. We analyse various factors that influence these results, including label ambiguity, label set and dataset size. We find that the IQA performance is poor in high- (English, German) and low-resource languages (Bavarian) and that it is beneficial to have a large amount of training data. Further, GPT-4o-mini does not possess enough pragmatic understanding to generate high-quality IQA data in any of our tested languages.
Mar 4, 2026cs.CL

CzechTopic: A Benchmark for Zero-Shot Topic Localization in Historical Czech Documents

Topic localization aims to identify spans of text that express a given topic defined by a name and description. To study this task, we introduce a human-annotated benchmark based on Czech historical documents, containing human-defined topics together with manually annotated spans and supporting evaluation at both document and word levels. Evaluation is performed relative to human agreement rather than a single reference annotation. We evaluate a diverse range of large language models alongside BERT-based models fine-tuned on a distilled development dataset. Results reveal substantial variability among LLMs, with performance ranging from near-human topic detection to pronounced failures in span localization. While the strongest models approach human agreement, the distilled token embedding models remain competitive despite their smaller scale. The dataset and evaluation framework are publicly available at: https://github.com/dcgm/czechtopic.
Mar 2, 2026cs.SD

When Spoof Detectors Travel: Evaluation Across 66 Languages in the Low-Resource Language Spoofing Corpus

We introduce LRLspoof, a large-scale multilingual synthetic-speech corpus for cross-lingual spoof detection, comprising 2,732 hours of audio generated with 24 open-source TTS systems across 66 languages, including 45 low-resource languages under our operational definition. To evaluate robustness without requiring target-domain bonafide speech, we benchmark 11 publicly available countermeasures using threshold transfer: for each model we calibrate an EER operating point on pooled external benchmarks and apply the resulting threshold, reporting spoof rejection rate (SRR). Results show model-dependent cross-lingual disparity, with spoof rejection varying markedly across languages even under controlled conditions, highlighting language as an independent source of domain shift in spoof detection. The dataset is publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/lab260/LRLspoof}{\textbf{\underline{\textit{HuggingFace}}}} and \href{https://modelscope.cn/datasets/lab260/LRLspoof}{\textbf{\underline{\textit{ModelScope}}}}
Feb 25, 2026cs.CL

MixSarc: A Bangla-English Code-Mixed Corpus for Implicit Meaning Identification

Bangla-English code-mixing is widespread across South Asian social media, yet resources for implicit meaning identification in this setting remain scarce. Existing sentiment and sarcasm models largely focus on monolingual English or high-resource languages and struggle with transliteration variation, cultural references, and intra-sentential language switching. To address this gap, we introduce MixSarc, the first publicly available Bangla-English code-mixed corpus for implicit meaning identification. The dataset contains 9,087 manually annotated sentences labeled for humor, sarcasm, offensiveness, and vulgarity. We construct the corpus through targeted social media collection, systematic filtering, and multi-annotator validation. We benchmark transformer-based models and evaluate zero-shot large language models under structured prompting. Results show strong performance on humor detection but substantial degradation on sarcasm, offense, and vulgarity due to class imbalance and pragmatic complexity. Zero-shot models achieve competitive micro-F1 scores but low exact match accuracy. Further analysis reveals that over 42% of negative sentiment instances in an external dataset exhibit sarcastic characteristics. MixSarc provides a foundational resource for culturally aware NLP and supports more reliable multi-label modeling in code-mixed environments.
Jan 13, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Transfer Accuracy: Mechanism-Guided Controlled Adaptation for Low-Resource Languages

Existing circuit discovery methods rely on templated tasks with clean counterfactuals, limiting their use on diverse natural text. We adapt Contextual Decomposition for Transformers (CD-T) for unstructured settings via label-balanced activation means and task-directional relevance scoring, enabling counterfactual-free circuit discovery. We leverage the discovered circuits for Circuit-Targeted Supervised Fine-Tuning (CT-SFT), restricting parameter updates to task-relevant heads and LayerNorm. Experiments on NusaX cross-lingual sentiment transfer show that CT-SFT is highly competitive for low-resource adaptation. While non-circuit sparse updates and full fine-tuning sometimes match target accuracy through capacity recruitment, CT-SFT most consistently avoids catastrophic forgetting, preserving source-language and related-task performance. Extensions to XNLI support the source-retention and intervention findings on a harder task and two model families, showing that circuit-targeted adaptation provides a more controlled, intervention-supported alternative to global fine-tuning.
Jan 10, 2026cs.CL

AfriqueLLM: How Data Mixing and Model Architecture Impact Continued Pre-training for African Languages

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present \texttt{AfriqueLLM}, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation. Models and code have been released on Huggingface and Github.
Dec 17, 2025cs.CV

Emotion Recognition in Signers

Recognition of signers' emotions suffers from one theoretical challenge and one practical challenge, namely, the overlap between grammatical and affective facial expressions and the scarcity of data for model training. This paper addresses these two challenges in a cross-lingual setting using our eJSL dataset, a new benchmark dataset for emotion recognition in Japanese Sign Language signers, and BOBSL, a large British Sign Language dataset with subtitles. In eJSL, two signers expressed 78 distinct utterances with each of seven different emotional states, resulting in 1,092 video clips. We empirically demonstrate that 1) textual emotion recognition in spoken language mitigates data scarcity in sign language, 2) temporal segment selection has a significant impact, and 3) incorporating hand motion enhances emotion recognition in signers. Finally we establish a stronger baseline than spoken language LLMs.
Dec 5, 2025cs.CL

LMSpell: Spell Correction with Pre-Trained Language Models

Spell correction is still a challenging problem for many languages, especially low-resource languages (LRLs). While pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been employed for spell correction, there has been no proper comparison across PLMs. We present the first empirical study on the effectiveness of the three types of PLMs for spell correction across multiple languages, including low-resource languages. We show that even relatively small PLMs such as the 270M-parameter Gemma 3 and mBART50, when fine-tuned on a dataset of only 5k sentences, can outperform rule-based spell correctors, highlighting a practical pathway for building effective spell correction systems with limited data. We also present a case study with Sinhala to shed light on the plight of spell correction for LRLs.
Oct 31, 2025cs.CL

Simple Additions, Substantial Gains: Expanding Scripts, Languages, and Lineage Coverage in URIEL+

The URIEL+ linguistic knowledge base supports multilingual research by encoding languages through geographic, genetic, and typological vectors. However, data sparsity (e.g. missing feature types, incomplete language entries, and limited genealogical coverage) remains prevalent. This limits the usefulness of URIEL+ in cross-lingual transfer, particularly for supporting low-resource languages. To address this sparsity, we extend URIEL+ by introducing script vectors to represent writing system properties for 7,488 languages, integrating Glottolog to add 18,710 additional languages, and expanding lineage imputation for 26,449 languages by propagating typological and script features across genealogies. These improvements reduce feature sparsity by 14% for script vectors, increase language coverage by up to 19,015 languages (1,007%), and boost imputation quality metrics by up to 35%. Our benchmark on cross-lingual transfer tasks (oriented around low-resource languages) shows occasionally divergent performance compared to URIEL+, with performance gains up to 6% in certain setups.
Oct 28, 2025cs.CL

LuxIT: A Luxembourgish Instruction Tuning Dataset from Monolingual Seed Data

The effectiveness of instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) is often limited in low-resource linguistic settings due to a lack of high-quality training data. We introduce LuxIT, a novel, monolingual instruction tuning dataset for Luxembourgish developed to mitigate this challenge. We synthesize the dataset from a corpus of native Luxembourgish texts, utilizing DeepSeek-R1-0528, chosen for its shown proficiency in Luxembourgish. Following generation, we apply a quality assurance process, employing an LLM-as-a-judge approach, retaining 227,507 high-quality instruction-answer pairs. To investigate the practical utility of the dataset, we fine-tune 14 smaller-scale LLMs (≤\leq15B parameters) on LuxIT and evaluate them on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and five downstream NLP tasks. Training on LuxIT yields a mean accuracy change of +5.37 percentage points on language exams across all 14 models, with 12 of 14 showing improvement. On NLP downstream tasks, 9 of 14 models improve in macro-averaged F1, though gains on the two benchmarks do not systematically correlate. These results underscore the feasibility of leveraging monolingual synthetic data to improve LLM capabilities in low-resource languages, while highlighting the multi-faceted nature of language proficiency.
Oct 20, 2025cs.CL

Evaluating Large Language Models on Urdu Idioms

Idioms remain a persistent challenge in natural language processing due to their figurative and culturally grounded meanings, which distinguish them from literal expressions. Although recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved idiom handling across several languages, limited attention has been given to low resource languages such as Urdu. In this work, we present a comprehensive benchmark for Urdu to English idiomatic translation, consisting of a manually verified dataset of 4,000 aligned idiom sentence pairs in both Perso Arabic (native Urdu script) and Romanized Urdu. We evaluate multiple tasks, including translation, paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and back-translation, using diverse prompting strategies such as cultural prompting, idiomatic prompting, and few-shot learning. Our findings show that frontier LLMs consistently outperform traditional neural machine translation systems across all evaluation settings, particularly in preserving figurative and metaphorical meaning. While models demonstrate relatively stable performance on native Urdu script, the absence of standardized orthography in Romanized Urdu introduces substantial challenges for consistency and idiom span detection. This work establishes a high quality benchmark for cross script idiomatic evaluation in Urdu and underscores the importance of prompt engineering in preserving figurative language meaning across languages.
Aug 6, 2025cs.LG

Agnostics: Learning to Code in Any Programming Language via Reinforcement with a Universal Learning Environment

Large language models (LLMs) already excel at writing code in high-resource languages such as Python and JavaScript, yet stumble on low-resource languages that remain essential to science and engineering. Besides the obvious shortage of pre-training data, post-training itself is a bottleneck: every new language seems to require new datasets, test harnesses, and reinforcement-learning (RL) infrastructure. We introduce Agnostics, a language-agnostic post-training pipeline that eliminates this per-language engineering. The key idea is to judge code solely by its externally observable behavior, so a single verifier can test solutions written in any language. Concretely, we (i) use an LLM to rewrite existing unit-test datasets into an I/O format, (ii) supply a short configuration that tells the verifier how to compile and run a target language, and (iii) apply reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) in a robust code execution environment. Applied to five low-resource languages--Lua, Julia, R, OCaml, and Fortran--Agnostics (1) improves Qwen-3 4B to performance that rivals other 16B-70B open-weight models; (2) scales cleanly to larger and diverse model families (Qwen-3 8B, DeepSeek Coder 6.7B Instruct, Phi 4 Mini); and (3) for ≤16{\le} 16B parameter models, sets new state-of-the-art pass@1 results on MultiPL-E and a new multi-language version of LiveCodeBench that we introduce. We release the language-agnostic training datasets (Ag-MBPP-X, Ag-Codeforces-X, Ag-LiveCodeBench-X), training code, and ready-to-use configurations, making RL post-training in any programming language as simple as editing a short YAML file.
Aug 6, 2025cs.CL

Parity-Aware Byte-Pair Encoding: Improving Cross-lingual Fairness in Tokenization

Tokenization is the first -- and often least scrutinized -- step of most NLP pipelines. Standard algorithms for learning tokenizers rely on frequency-based objectives, which favor languages dominant in the training data and consequently leave lower-resource languages with tokenizations that are disproportionately longer, morphologically implausible, or even riddled with <UNK><UNK> placeholders. This phenomenon ultimately amplifies computational and financial inequalities between users from different language backgrounds. To remedy this, we introduce Parity-aware Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), a variant of the widely-used BPE algorithm. At every merge step, Parity-aware BPE applies a fair-max rule that maximizes the compression gain of the currently worst-compressed language, trading a small amount of global compression for cross-lingual parity. We find empirically that Parity-aware BPE reduces tokenization inequality -- operationalized by the Gini coefficient of per-language token costs -- by up to 89% relative to Classical BPE. This comes with negligible impact on global compression rate and no evidence of systematic degradation in downstream LM performance.
Jun 11, 2025cs.CL

ToxSyn-PT: A Synthetic Fine-Grained Dataset of Minority-Targeted Toxic Language in Portuguese

The development of robust hate speech detection systems remains limited by the lack of large-scale, fine-grained training data, especially for languages beyond English. Existing corpora typically rely on simplistic toxic and non-toxic labels, and the few that capture hate directed at specific minority groups lack the positive counterexamples required to distinguish genuine hate from mere discussion. In this work, we introduce ToxSyn-PT, the first Portuguese large-scale corpus explicitly designed for multi-label hate speech detection across nine protected minority groups, including the non-toxic counterexamples absent in all other public datasets. Generated via a controllable four-stage pipeline, ToxSyn contains discourse-type annotations to capture rhetorical strategies of toxic/non-toxic language, such as sarcasm, dehumanization, and cultural appreciation. Our experiments reveal a catastrophic, mutual generalization failure compared to existing datasets from social-media domains: models trained on social media struggle to generalize to minority-specific contexts, and vice-versa. This finding indicates they are distinct tasks and exposes summary metrics like Macro F1 can be unreliable indicators of true model behavior, as they completely mask model failure. We publicly release ToxSyn on HuggingFace to support reproducible research on synthetic data generation and benchmark progress in hate-speech detection for low- and mid-resource languages.
May 18, 2025cs.LG

BenSParX: A Robust Explainable Machine Learning Framework for Parkinson's Disease Detection from Bengali Conversational Speech

Early detection of PD remains particularly challenging in resource-constrained settings, where voice-based analysis has emerged as a promising non-invasive and cost-effective alternative. However, existing studies predominantly focus on English or other major languages; notably, no voice dataset for PD exists for Bengali -- a language spoken by over 230 million people worldwide -- posing a significant barrier to culturally inclusive and accessible healthcare solutions. We present BenSparX, the first Bengali conversational speech dataset for PD detection, along with a robust and explainable ML framework tailored for early diagnosis. The proposed framework incorporates diverse acoustic feature categories, systematic feature selection methods, and state-of-the-art ML classifiers with extensive hyperparameter optimization. Furthermore, to enhance interpretability and trust in model predictions, the framework incorporates SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) analysis to quantify the contribution of individual acoustic features toward PD detection. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding an accuracy of 95.67%, F1 score of 95.62%, and AUC of 0.990. We further validated our approach by applying the framework to existing PD datasets in other languages, where it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. This study lays the foundation for identifying subtle yet clinically meaningful vocal biomarkers, particularly in low-resource settings such as Bengali-speaking populations, and represents a significant step toward equitable, explainable, and robust digital health diagnostics for neurodegenerative disorders. The labelled acoustic-feature dataset derived from the audio recordings in this study is available at https://github.com/riadEDU/BenSParX.