Low-Resource Language Processing

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Overview

Low-resource language processing studies how to build reliable text, speech, and multimodal tools when data, annotation, computing resources, or standard writing conventions are limited. Common approaches include transferring multilingual pretrained models, adapting them with continued pretraining or parameter-efficient fine-tuning, creating synthetic data, and developing language-specific tokenizers, corpora, and tools. Benchmarks for tasks such as translation, speech recognition, information retrieval, reasoning, and cultural understanding increasingly test performance across languages, dialects, scripts, and domains. A central tension is that transfer and synthetic data can reduce development costs, but gains are uneven and depend on data quality, linguistic fit, and evaluation grounded in the language community.

Latest papers

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567 papers53 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Portuguese Question Answering: A Comparative Study of PEFT on BERTimbau and Exploratory Evaluation of Generative LLMs

    Mar 22, 2026Mariela M. Nina, Caio Veloso Costa, Lilian Berton +1Parameter-Efficient Fine-TuningQuestion Answering

    Institute of Science and Technology, Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil

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

    Mar 22, 2026K. M. Jubair Sami, Dipto Sumit, Ariyan Hossain +1Social Bias in Language ModelsDialect Bias in Language Models

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

  3. ViCLSR: A Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework with Natural Language Inference for Natural Language Understanding Tasks

    Mar 22, 2026Tin Van Huynh, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy NguyenSentence EmbeddingsSupervised Contrastive Learning

    University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. · Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

  4. Left Behind: Cross-Lingual Transfer as a Bridge for Low-Resource Languages in Large Language Models

    Mar 22, 2026Abdul-Salem BeibitkhanLow-Resource Language ProcessingMultilingual Language Model Evaluation

    North American University

  5. SozKZ: Training Efficient Small Language Models for Kazakh from Scratch

    Mar 21, 2026Saken TukenovLanguage Model PretrainingSmall Language Models

    Independent Researcher

  6. MzansiText and MzansiLM: An Open Corpus and Decoder-Only Language Model for South African Languages

    Mar 21, 2026Anri Lombard, Simbarashe Mawere, Temi Aina +5African Language ProcessingMultilingual Language Models

    University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

  7. Curation of a Palaeohispanic Dataset for Machine Learning

    Mar 20, 2026Gonzalo Martínez-Fernández, Jose F Quesada, Agustín Riscos-Núñez +1Low-Resource Language Processing

    Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Universidad de Sevilla, Avda. Reina Mercedes s/n, 41012 Seville, Spain · Department of Spanish Language, Linguistics and Theory of Literature, University of Seville, C/ Palos de la Frontera s/n 41004, Seville, Spain

  8. What Really Controls Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models: Tokenisation or Representation of Time?

    Mar 19, 2026Gagan Bhatia, Ahmad Muhammad Isa, Maxime Peyrard +1Tokenization in Language ModelsTemporal Reasoning in Language Models

    University of Aberdeen · Université Grenoble Alpes & CNRS

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

    Mar 19, 2026Maxime Poli, Manel Khentout, Angelo Ortiz Tandazo +3Speech ProcessingSelf-Supervised Speech Representation Learning

    LSCP, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France · University of Toronto, Canada

  10. CWoMP: Morpheme Representation Learning for Interlinear Glossing

    Mar 18, 2026Morris Alper, Enora Rice, Bhargav Shandilya +2Representation LearningLow-Resource Language Processing

    Carnegie Mellon University · University of Colorado Boulder

  11. Toward Generalized Cross-Lingual Hateful Language Detection with Web-Scale Data and Ensemble LLM Annotations

    Mar 18, 2026Dang H. Dang, Jelena Mitrovi, Michael GranitzerHate Speech DetectionLow-Resource Language Processing

    University of Passau, Chair of Data Science

  12. Language on Demand, Knowledge at Core: Composing LLMs with Encoder-Decoder Translation Models for Extensible Multilinguality

    Mar 18, 2026Mengyu Bu, Yang FengMultilingual Language ModelsCross-Lingual Transfer

    Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT/CAS) · State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

  13. TharuChat: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for a Low-Resource Language via Synthetic Data and Human Validation

    Mar 17, 2026Prajwal Panth, Agniva MaitiLow-Resource Language ProcessingSynthetic Data Generation for Language Models

    School of Computer Engineering, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, India

  14. Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech

    Mar 17, 2026Omnilingual SONAR Team, João Maria Janeiro, Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot +17Sentence EmbeddingsCross-Lingual Representation Alignment

    FAIR at Meta

  15. Who Benchmarks the Benchmarks? A Case Study of LLM Evaluation in Icelandic

    Mar 17, 2026Finnur Ágúst Ingimundarson, Steinunn Rut Friðriksdóttir, Bjarki Ármannsson +2LLM EvaluationBenchmark Validity

    University of Zürich · University of Iceland · The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies

  16. PashtoCorp: A 1.25-Billion-Word Corpus, Evaluation Suite, and Reproducible Pipeline for Low-Resource Language Development

    Mar 17, 2026Hanif RahmanLow-Resource Language ProcessingLanguage Model Pretraining

    Independent Researcher

  17. SEAHateCheck: Functional Tests for Detecting Hate Speech in Low-Resource Languages of Southeast Asia

    Mar 17, 2026Ri Chi Ng, Aditi Kumaresan, Yujia Hu +1Hate Speech DetectionLow-Resource Language Processing

    Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore

  18. Robust Language Identification for Romansh Varieties

    Mar 16, 2026Charlotte Model, Sina Ahmadi, Jannis VamvasLanguage IdentificationLow-Resource Language Processing

    University of Zurich

  19. SlovKE: A Large-Scale Dataset and LLM Evaluation for Slovak Keyphrase Extraction

    Mar 16, 2026David Števaňák, Marek ŠuppaDocument Information ExtractionLow-Resource Language Processing

    University of Vienna, Austria · NaiveNeuron · Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava +1

  20. SEA-Vision: A Multilingual Benchmark for Comprehensive Document and Scene Text Understanding in Southeast Asia

    Mar 16, 2026Pengfei Yue, Xingran Zhao, Juntao Chen +6Multilingual VLM EvaluationDocument Parsing

    Xiamen University, China · Shopee, China · Tongji University, China

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

    Mar 16, 2026Miriam Winkler, Verena Blaschke, Barbara PlankQuestion AnsweringMultilingual QA

    UMaiNLP lab, Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich, Germany · ÆMunich Center for Machine Learning, Germany

  22. Pretraining and Benchmarking Modern Encoders for Latvian

    Mar 16, 2026Arturs ZnotinsLanguage Model PretrainingLow-Resource Language Processing

    Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, 29 Raina bulv., Riga, LV-1459, Latvia

  23. Parameter-Efficient Quality Estimation via Frozen Recursive Models

    Mar 15, 2026Umar Abubacar, Roman Bauer, Diptesh KanojiaLow-Resource Language ProcessingMT Evaluation

    NICE Research Group, University of Surrey, UK · Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI (PAI), University of Surrey, UK

  24. Multilingual TinyStories: A Synthetic Combinatorial Corpus of Indic Children's Stories for Training Small Language Models

    Mar 15, 2026Deepon Halder, Angira MukherjeeSynthetic Data Generation for Language ModelsLow-Resource Language Processing

    AI4Bharat, IIEST Shibpur · IIEST Shibpur

  25. CangjieBench: Benchmarking LLMs on a Low-Resource General-Purpose Programming Language

    Mar 15, 2026Junhang Cheng, Fang Liu, Jia Li +3Code GenerationLLM Code Generation

    Beihang University, Beijing, China · Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

  26. Vavanagi: a Community-run Platform for Documentation of the Hula Language in Papua New Guinea

    Mar 15, 2026Bri Olewale, Raphael Merx, Ekaterina VylomovaLow-Resource Language Processing

    Vula’a Kunenai Community, Central Province, Papua New Guinea · The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

  27. OasisSimp: An Open-source Asian-English Sentence Simplification Dataset

    Mar 14, 2026Hannah Liu, Muxin Tian, Iqra Ali +8Text SimplificationLow-Resource Language Processing

    University of Toronto · Queen Mary University of London · Yale University +5

  28. GhanaNLP Parallel Corpora: Comprehensive Multilingual Resources for Low-Resource Ghanaian Languages

    Mar 14, 2026Lawrence Adu Gyamfi, Paul Azunre, Stephen Edward Moore +4African Language ProcessingLow-Resource Language Processing

    Ghana Natural Language Processing, Ghana · Khaya AI LTD, Ghana · Department of Mathematics, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana

  29. Cross-Lingual Transfer and Parameter-Efficient Adaptation in the Turkic Language Family: A Theoretical Framework for Low-Resource Language Models

    Mar 13, 2026O. Ibrahimzade, K. TabasaranskyCross-Lingual TransferMultilingual Language Models

  30. MUNIChus: Multilingual News Image Captioning Benchmark

    Mar 11, 2026Yuji Chen, Alistair Plum, Hansi Hettiarachchi +4Image CaptioningMultilingual VLM Evaluation

    Lancaster University, UK · University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg · University of Surrey, UK +1