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. Crowdsourcing Piedmontese to Test LLMs on Non-Standard Orthography

    Feb 16, 2026Gianluca Vico, Jindřich LibovickýTokenization in Language ModelsLow-Resource Language Processing

    Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Malostranské náměstí 25, 118 00 Praha, Czech Republic

  2. Large Language Models for Math Education in Low-Resource Languages: A Study in Sinhala and Tamil

    Feb 16, 2026Sukumar Kishanthan, Kumar Thushalika, Buddhi Jayasekara +1Numerical Reasoning in Language ModelsCross-Lingual Reasoning in Language Models

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Moratuwa Moratuwa, Sri Lanka · Department of Electrical and Information Engineering University of Ruhuna Galle, Sri Lanka · Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences Tampere University Tampere, Finland +1

  3. BETA-Labeling for Multilingual Dataset Construction in Low-Resource IR

    Feb 16, 2026Md. Najib Hasan, Mst. Jannatun Ferdous Rain, Fyad Mohammed +1Low-Resource Language ProcessingLLM-Assisted Annotation

    Wichita State University · Begum Rokeya University, Rangpur · Khulna University of Engineering & Technology +1

  4. Task-Lens: Cross-Task Utility Based Speech Dataset Profiling for Low-Resource Indian Languages

    Feb 16, 2026Swati Sharma, Divya V. Sharma, Anubha GuptaLow-Resource Language ProcessingSpeech Processing

    SBI Lab, IIIT Delhi

  5. Artificial intelligence is creating a new global linguistic hierarchy

    Feb 12, 2026Giulia Occhini, Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii, Anna Barford +10Low-Resource Language Processing

    University of Cambridge, UK. · Waseda University, Japan. · University College London, UK. +1

  6. MasalBench: A Benchmark for Contextual and Cross-Cultural Understanding of Persian Proverbs in LLMs

    Jan 29, 2026Ghazal Kalhor, Behnam BahrakCross-Cultural Language Model EvaluationFigurative Language Understanding

    School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran · Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies, Khatam University, Tehran, Iran

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

    Jan 13, 2026Khumaisa Nur'aini, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji +1Selective Fine-TuningCircuit Discovery

    Monash University Indonesia · MBZUAI · Institute Teknologi Bandung +1

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

    Jan 10, 2026Hao Yu, Tianyi Xu, Michael A. Hedderich +3Language Model PretrainingMultilingual Language Models

    McGill University, Canada · Mila-Quebec AI Institute, Canada · LMU Munich & Munich Center for Machine Learning, Germany +2

  9. Toward Global Large Language Models in Medicine

    Jan 5, 2026Rui Yang, Huitao Li, Weihao Xuan +47Medical LLMsMultilingual Language Model Evaluation

  10. Emotion Recognition in Signers

    Dec 17, 2025Kotaro Funakoshi, Yaoxiong ZhuFacial Expression RecognitionLow-Resource Language Processing

    FIRST, Institute of Integrated Research · Institute of Science Tokyo · ICT, School of Engineering

  11. LMSpell: Spell Correction with Pre-Trained Language Models

    Dec 5, 2025Akesh Gunathilake, Nadil Karunarathna, Tharusha Bandaranayake +3Low-Resource Language ProcessingLanguage Model Post-Training

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Katubedda, 10400, Sri Lanka · School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, Massey University, Auckland, 102904, New Zealand

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

    Oct 31, 2025Mason Shipton, York Hay Ng, Aditya Khan +4Low-Resource Language ProcessingCross-Lingual Transfer

    Ontario Tech University · University of Toronto · University of Michigan +1

  13. LuxIT: A Luxembourgish Instruction Tuning Dataset from Monolingual Seed Data

    Oct 28, 2025Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo +1LLM Fine-TuningSynthetic Data Generation

    Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology 5 Av. des Hauts-Fourneaux L-4362 Esch-sur-Alzette

  14. Is Multilingual LLM Watermarking Truly Multilingual? Scaling Robustness to 100+ Languages via Back-Translation

    Oct 20, 2025Asim Mohamed, Martin GubriMultilingual Language Model EvaluationBack-Translation

    Parameter Lab · École Polytechnique, IP Paris, CNRS

  15. Evaluating Large Language Models on Urdu Idioms

    Oct 20, 2025Muhammad Farmal Khan, Mousumi AkterMultilingual Language Model EvaluationLow-Resource Language Processing

    Technical University Dortmund · Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security

  16. MoVoC: Morphology-Aware Subword Construction for Geez Script Languages Corrected version

    Sep 10, 2025Hailay Kidu Teklehaymanot, Dren Fazlija, Wolfgang NejdlMorphology-Aware TokenizationSubword Tokenization

    L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany

  17. Prompting with Sign Parameters for Low-resource Sign Language Instruction Generation

    Aug 22, 2025Md Tariquzzaman, Md Farhan Ishmam, Saiyma Sittul Muna +2VLM EvaluationVision-Language Models

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering Islamic University of Technology, Bangladesh

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

    Aug 6, 2025Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki, Yangtian Zi, Zixuan Wu +4RL for Code GenerationCode Generation

    1Northeastern University · University of Texas · 3Wellesley College

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

    Aug 6, 2025Negar Foroutan, Clara Meister, Debjit Paul +4Low-Resource Language ProcessingSubword Tokenization

    EPFL · University of Zurich

  20. GHTM: A graph-based hybrid topic modeling approach for Bengali language

    Aug 1, 2025Farhana Haque, Md. Abdur Rahman, Sumon AhmedTopic ModelingLow-Resource Language Processing

    Institute of Information Technology (IIT), University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh · Centre for Advanced Research in Sciences (CARS), University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

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

    Jun 11, 2025Iago Alves Brito, Julia Soares Dollis, Fernanda Bufon Farber +2Synthetic Data GenerationHate Speech Detection

    Advanced Knowledge Center for Immersive Technologies (AKCIT) · Federal University of Goiás

  22. UrduFactCheck: An Agentic Fact-Checking Framework for Urdu with Evidence Boosting and Benchmarking

    May 21, 2025Sarfraz Ahmad, Hasan Iqbal, Momina Ahsan +6LLM EvaluationFactual Consistency Evaluation

    MBZUAI

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

    May 18, 2025Riad Hossain, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Arat Ibne Golam Mowla +2Parkinson's Disease Detection from SpeechSpeech Processing

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology, Chittagong, 4349, Bangladesh · School of Computing, Mathematics and Engineering, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, 2795, Australia · School of Science, Engineering and Technology, East Delta University, Chittagong, 4209, Bangladesh +1

  24. FLAME: A New Dataset on FLemish Accounts of Momentary Experiences

    Apr 20, 2025Ratna Kandala, Niels Vanhasbroeck, Katie HoemannTopic ModelingLow-Resource Language Processing

    University of Kansas · Kansas, USA · University of Amsterdam +1

  25. Transferring Natural Language Datasets Between Languages Using Large Language Models for Modern Decision Support and Sci-Tech Analytical Systems

    Oct 17, 2024Dmitrii Popov, Egor Terentev, Danil Serenko +2LLM-Assisted AnnotationLow-Resource Language Processing

    Federal Research Center “Computer Science and Control” of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FRC CSC RAS), Moscow 119333, Russia · Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and Natural Sciences, RUDN University, Moscow 117198, Russia · Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IITP RAS), Moscow 127051, Russia +1

  26. Leveraging LLMs for Translating and Classifying Mental Health Data

    Oct 16, 2024Konstantinos Skianis, A. Seza Doğruöz, John PavlopoulosDepression Severity EstimationClinical NLP

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece · LT3, IDLab, Universiteit Gent, Belgium · Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece +1

  27. A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmap

    May 10, 2024Sheriff Issaka, Erick Rosas Gonzalez, Colene Agbo +18Low-Resource Language ProcessingAfrican Language Processing

    African Languages Lab