Luxembourgish

Synthetic speech can provide additional supervision for automatic speech recognition (ASR), but constructing useful synthetic training data requires choosing both what to synthesize and how to synthesize it. We present a phoneme-guided text-to-speech (TTS) augmentation pipeline for ASR that connects multilingual speech generation with candidate-text selection and reference-speech quality control. Within this pipeline, we propose phoneme-frequency-guided selection (PFGS), which uses phoneme frequencies from real ASR training transcripts to prioritize candidate texts containing common phonetic content. Experiments with separate monolingual ASR systems cover four languages and 13 test sets. With random text selection, the pipeline improves recognition on 11 test sets at one or more synthesis ratios. PFGS further outperforms random selection on nine test sets, with relative word error rate (WER) reductions of up to 19.3%. An ablation with fixed target texts and synthesis counts further shows the benefit of reference-speech filtering. These results support using real-data phoneme statistics to guide the construction of effective synthetic supervision for ASR.

Large language models are increasingly being deployed in governmental settings, yet few existing evaluation frameworks jointly reflect the values of public administration and the linguistic requirements of non-English contexts. We present the "Grip on LLMs" framework, a systematic evaluation suite for Dutch governmental use developed in collaboration with domain experts from a major Dutch municipal organisation. Through an advisory board process, user research, and a survey of the users of a civil-servant chatbot, we identify six evaluation dimensions (factuality, honesty, social bias, energy consumption, cost, and training data transparency) and operationalise them into a benchmark suite covering more than 30 multilingual and Dutch-specific models. Our results reveal that no single model excels across all dimensions, and that trade-offs are unavoidable: higher quality consistently comes at greater environmental impact and financial cost, while bias remains largely independent of both. We further find that factuality (whether a model answers correctly) and honesty (whether a model acknowledges what it does not know) are governed by distinct properties, with high factuality not implying high honesty. To make these findings actionable for non-technical audiences, we release a publicly accessible, user-friendly model overview designed for the full range of stakeholders involved in governmental LLM selection, from engineers to policymakers.

We identify and quantify temporal misgrounding: the systematic retrieval and citation of the currently in-force version of a legal article when the applicable version is an earlier or future one. Standard legal RAG treats the corpus as static; we argue legal question answering is a temporally-indexed retrieval problem. We introduce FiscalQA Pro, pairing a versioned corpus of 32,436 article-versions of the French tax code (93 years, 1938-2031) with an all-model-hard temporal-reasoning track: 209 scored, expert-reviewed questions across 33 CGI articles (221 released; twelve flagged out of the answerable scope). At selection time, no evaluated model recovered its date-applicable answer closed-book in any of four sampling draws, and the currently in-force text lacks the gold value for all but one of the scored questions. Answers are scored deterministically via atomic ground-truth "nuggets" (regex and numeric-with-tolerance), never LLM-as-judge: an LLM judge would inherit the temporal bias it is meant to score. Across eleven models (five frontier closed-API systems plus Gemini 2.5 Pro as a substitute entry, and five open-weight), parametric knowledge yields 3.0% mean strict accuracy and RAG over a static current-version corpus 2.7%. Static RAG retrieves the date-applicable version 0% of the time, confidently citing a real but inapplicable version. Our end-to-end retriever over a multi-version index, with no oracle, reaches 98.3% mean strict; an oracle-article ablation reaches 99.1%, locating the residual gap in first-stage recall, not version selection. We additionally release a version-aware jurisprudence dataset of 69,208 citation links, together with the corpus, benchmark, model responses, and pipeline code.

Embedding benchmarks measure standalone model quality, but they do not establish whether a low-cost retriever contributes complementary ranking information once lexical and transformer-based retrieval are already combined. We present a controlled evaluation of this question across Dutch retrieval tasks from the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark for Dutch (MTEB-NL). Weighted reciprocal rank fusion (RRF) combines Best Matching 25 (BM25), Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B (Qwen), and two multilingual static embedding models. Five datasets comprising 14,500 queries and 786,573 documents are scored exhaustively, and fusion weights are searched on a simplex in increments of 0.1. Ten-fold query-level cross-validation selects weights on nine folds and evaluates them on the held-out fold; paired bootstrap confidence intervals and sign-randomisation tests quantify the resulting differences. Fusion improves over the training-selected individual retriever by 0.061 mean reciprocal rank (MRR) on Dutch News, 0.029 on VABB, 0.004 on WebFAQ NL, and 0.025 on Wikipedia NL, while matching BM25 on Open Tender. All four positive differences remain distinguishable from zero after Holm correction. No unrestricted fold assigns positive weight to either static retriever: all 50 selections lie on the BM25-Qwen edge, and forcing a static contribution reduces effectiveness. Leave-one-dataset-out selection chooses equal BM25-Qwen weighting in every iteration and outperforms the cross-domain-selected individual retriever on every held-out task. The results support a two-retriever lexical-transformer architecture as a robust tested default across the evaluated Dutch tasks and show that standalone benchmark performance is insufficient to establish marginal value in hybrid retrieval.

Migrants traversing geographically distinct routes such as the Trans-Saharan and Balkan corridors often recount strikingly parallel lived experiences: police violence, smuggler exploitation, dangerous crossings, and family separation. We introduce the task of experiential intertextuality detection: automatically identifying shared experiential echoes across migration narratives without requiring annotated training data. From 108 French migration narratives spanning both corridors, we automatically generate sentence pairs and score them using annotation-free methods: lexical baselines, sentence embeddings, POS-based structural features, a migration-specific theme lexicon, context-aware narrative features, and zero-shot LLM scoring with Qwen2.5-7B and Mistral-7B under three prompting strategies. We validate all methods against 816 expert-annotated intertextuality judgments (inter-annotator Krippendorff's $α= 0.27$). Our results reveal that all surface, structural, and embedding methods correlate only weakly with expert judgments ($r \leq 0.30$); Qwen2.5-7B zero-shot achieves the best single-method correlation ($r = 0.38$); few-shot examples degrade Qwen but dramatically improve Mistral; narrative position significantly predicts intertextuality, with departure-phase pairs showing the highest experiential echoes; and a supervised hybrid combining all 31 features achieves $r = 0.45$, a 21% improvement over the best individual method.

Rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems account for the vast majority of PV grid connections, yet no open, comprehensive, installation-level dataset of these systems exists: public registries aggregate data only above a capacity threshold, and remote sensing-based detection efforts, while extensive, are typically confined to a single method, a limited geographic scope, or a single point in time. We introduce OpenPVMapper, a nationwide, multi-source database of rooftop PV installations in mainland France, built by aggregating and reconciling complementary sources: a deep learning-based detection pipeline deployed on nationwide aerial imagery, OpenStreetMap and a probabilistic building-level detection dataset. The resulting database contains 1,135,850 installations, totaling approximately 15.01~GWp of installed capacity, each documented with its provenance, detection method, and, where available, a manual validation flag. Manual review of a stratified sample of 1,862 installations places the database's overall precision at approximately 74--75%, with corroboration across independent sources bringing a substantial, quantified precision gain. By aggregating independent sources rather than relying on any single detection method, OpenPVMapper reaches a level of confidence beyond what any one source could provide on its own, while remaining extensible to further sources as they become available. It is released under an open (CC-BY) license alongside the full source code used to build it.

Maintenance regulations are complex legal texts that are difficult to exploit when addressing a specific case and challenging to integrate into operational systems. This paper presents a two-stage LLM-assisted workflow for French maintenance regulations: ontology engineering from a SEMLEG-based core ontology, followed by construction of an ontology-grounded French legal knowledge graph. The first stage consists in the open extraction of typed entities and triples from a stratified corpus sample, the normalization of labels through embedding-based fusion, and the induction of candidate object properties with their signature (domain and range). The second stage uses the resulting ontology to guide the closed extraction of triples and RDF graph construction over the full corpus. Experiments with GPT-4.1 and mistral-large-2512 show robust structured outputs, near-complete class alignment, and a substantial reduction of duplicated entities and predicates after fusion. Fewer than 20% of triples introduce unseen properties, while lower exact signature compliance reveals new domain-range combinations for existing predicates. These results point to predicate normalization and the validation of newly observed relation signatures as key refinement steps for industrial maintenance settings.

International recruitment in France requires navigating a layered legal framework absent from existing legal AI benchmarks. We present a publicly available benchmark and first comparative evaluation for this domain, covering permit-type recommendation, required-document retrieval, and legal citation coverage. Comparing a parametric LLM baseline against dense retrieval augmentation at two model scales (Qwen3.5-9B and -27B) on 52 annotated synthetic profiles, we find that retrieval improves administrative guidance at both scales, most notably permit-type accuracy. Our results confirm that retrieval grounding is important for more reliable administrative guidance in this domain, and motivate further investigation of hybrid retrieval strategies.

Humans are often considered to be the best listeners and seen as the upper-bound performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We present a preliminary comparison of the performances of state-of-the-art ASR systems and Dutch native listeners on the recognition of "diverse" speech, specifically Dutch child and older adults' speech and Flemish. Google Telephony outperformed the other ASR systems. Importantly, the ASR systems showed similar performance to the listeners, and in specific cases even outperformed them. Slight performance differences between the listeners and ASR systems were found related to speaker's age and regional accents and utterance length. Future research should focus on making ASR systems more robust to acoustic variability related to aging and regional accents. A comparison of ASR recognition performances on the test stimuli and the full Jasmin-CGN test sets showed the influence of the specific test sets on the conclusions regarding benchmarking human and ASR performance.

Spoken Question Answering (SQA) remains largely focused on high-resource languages and carefully recorded speech, limiting the reach of speech-LLM methods in low-resource settings. This paper investigates whether text-to-speech (TTS) can provide task-specific training data for Luxembourgish SQA without requiring a large human-recorded QA corpus. Starting from existing text-based QA resources, we translate questions into Luxembourgish, synthesize spoken questions with multiple TTS systems, and pair them with textual answers. We train a parameter-efficient SLAM-style architecture that connects a frozen Whisper encoder to frozen multilingual LLM backends through a learned projector and LoRA adapters. We compare MMS-TTS, Qwen3-TTS, and OmniVoice variants, including single-source corpora of about 48k questions and a 4TTS multi-source mix of approximately 230k questions. Evaluation on LLAMA-LB-Test with two real Luxembourgish speaker conditions shows that multi-source and voice-design-based synthetic training configurations yield the strongest SQA performance. The results also show that no-reference TTS quality scores do not monotonically predict downstream QA performance, indicating that synthetic speech must be evaluated as task-specific training data rather than only as natural-sounding audio.

State-of-the-art speech datasets predominantly focus on widely spoken languages, often overlooking low-resource languages such as Luxembourgish, which remain underrepresented in speech technology research. In this work, we introduce LuxEmo, a 21-hour conversational expressive speech corpus for Luxembourgish with 4 emotion categories. LuxEmo is derived from Radio Télévision Luxembourg (RTL) youth broadcasts, using automated detection followed by human validation. We propose a semi-automatic curation workflow combining voice activity detection, denoising, language identification, LuxASR-based segmentation, automatic emotion prediction, lexical cues, and targeted human review. Additionally, we benchmark five expressive TTS systems covering German-based cross-lingual transfer, multilingual Luxembourgish support, Luxembourgish adaptation, and non-parametric prosody transfer. Performance is evaluated using both objective metrics and human evaluation.

We present HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic: a French-language dataset of multi-hop historical questions derived from parliamentary debates and newspapers of the French Third Republic. Designed in collaboration with a historian, the corpus captures complex reasoning patterns typical of historical inquiry, including cross-source synthesis, temporal reasoning, and the integration of sparse evidence. The dataset is made of 1782 questions and emphasizes multi-hop connections across heterogeneous historical documents, providing a resource for evaluating retrieval-augmented and large language model systems in domain-specific contexts. We describe the methodology for constructing the corpus, including the selection and alignment of sources, question validation, and metadata integration. While the dataset focuses on French historical documents, our methodology can be readily adapted to other languages and national corpora. Finally, we demonstrate how the corpus can support realistic evaluation scenarios for multi-hop question answering, bridging the gap between NLP benchmarks and the needs of historical scholarship.

How do large-scale economic transformations shape cultural production? We address this question by combining computational linguistics, econometrics, and formal modelling, using French drama as a well-documented empirical laboratory. Applying latent Dirichlet allocation to a corpus of 1,215 theatrical texts published between 1700 and 1900, we show that aristocratic discourse centred on sovereignty and political authority was gradually displaced by bourgeois and household economic themes as French capitalism developed. Bayesian vector autoregressive models with max-share shock identification suggest a temporal shift in the literary response to economic shocks: bourgeois everyday-life themes reacted to GDP shocks in the eighteenth century, whereas household-economic concerns became responsive only after 1820, amid accelerating industrialisation. A discrete-choice model shows that peer effects among authors and sensitivity to prevailing economic conditions can jointly account for these dynamics. Monte Carlo simulations reproduce the observed historical trajectory with reasonable fidelity. These findings offer a quantitative framework for understanding how economic transformations propagate into cultural production through identifiable social mechanisms, contributing to the study of cultural evolution and the long-run relationship between institutions and literary discourse.

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

Train delay prediction is an important problem for both passengers and railway operators, yet progress in the field remains difficult to assess due to the lack of standardized datasets, prediction targets, and evaluation protocols. To address this gap, we introduce RIDE, an open dataset and benchmark for train delay prediction built at nationwide scale over the Belgian railway network. RIDE covers 94.5M train events, 3.6M journeys, and 35.7M weather records from 2023 to 2025. It is organized as a layered data pipeline from raw railway and weather sources to two public releases: a reusable intermediate relational dataset and model-ready benchmark datasets. The benchmark standardizes the prediction task and the training and testing data. It also provides a unified evaluation protocol that supports direct comparison across models. Using this framework, we provide the first comprehensive comparative evaluation of non-learning, statistical learning, and deep learning models. We show that learning-based methods clearly outperform non-learning models, with graph neural networks achieving the best mean performance, while the strongest learning-based models remain relatively close to one another. Beyond aggregate mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE), the framework also provides breakdowns by prediction horizon and delay change, enabling more detailed analysis of model behavior across forecasting regimes.

We introduce CARTE 1 (Culturally Anchored Regional-Territorial Evaluation), a multiplechoice benchmark for evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform fine-grained reasoning over geographically grounded and regionally differentiated knowledge within France. While prior benchmarks focus on national-level cultural understanding, they largely overlook intra-country variation and the need to distinguish between closely related regional contexts. CARTE addresses this gap by introducing 2,431 questions spanning the 13 metropolitan regions of France and covering 14 thematic domains, including culture, language, demographics, economy, environment, and mobility. We further introduce CARTE-LV, a subset targeting Linguistic Variation across French regions, enabling focused evaluation of language-related differences. We evaluate 27 LLMs ranging from 1B to 12B parameters under few-shot settings. Our experiments reveal performance disparities across regions and model scales, suggesting systematic gaps in pretraining coverage and limited robustness to intra-national variation.

Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injection, absorptive capacity, and institutional dissipation. Information injection includes compute, data, talent, research, capital, industrial deployment, and policy experimentation. Institutional dissipation refers to avoidable frictions such as administrative overload, coordination failures, energy constraints, regulatory uncertainty, talent mobility pressures, and weak industrial absorption. Regulation is not treated as mere friction: adaptive governance, trusted data spaces, and safety-oriented standards may increase long-term learning capacity by improving legitimacy, interoperability, and social trust. The central claim is not that a country follows neural-network equations, but that AI sovereignty depends on how effectively it converts distributed information into absorbed, coordinated, and socially legitimate capability. The paper connects HCLM with neural scaling laws, endogenous growth theory, creative destruction, absorptive capacity, and coordination mechanisms. It offers a formal heuristic, policy indicators, illustrative scenarios, and implications for France. The numerical results are diagnostic scenarios, not econometric estimates or official rankings. The proposed viewpoint reframes AI policy as the governance of an open, strategic, non-equilibrium learning system that should be tested with historical and cross-country data.

This article evaluates the integration of data extracted from a French syntactic lexicon, the Lexicon-Grammar (Gross, 1994), into a probabilistic parser. We show that by applying clustering methods on verbs of the French Treebank (Abeillé et al., 2003), we obtain accurate performances on French with a parser based on a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (Petrov et al., 2006).

We describe a new sense-tagged corpus for word sense disambiguation. The corpus is constituted of instances of 20 French polysemous verbs. Each verb instance is annotated with three sense labels: (1) the actual translation of the verb in the english version of this instance in a parallel corpus, (2) an entry of the verb in a computational dictionary of French (the Lexicon-Grammar tables) and (3) a fine-grained sense label resulting from the concatenation of the translation and the Lexicon-Grammar entry.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for writing assistance in small contact languages, yet it is unclear whether they respect community norms around lexical borrowing and neology. We introduce LexNeo-Bench, a 3{,}050-instance token-level benchmark derived from LuxBorrow, a large-scale Luxembourgish news corpus, where target tokens are labelled as native or as French, German, or English borrowings. Using this benchmark, we probe three multilingual LLMs across 34 prompt settings on two tasks: borrowing type classification and a binary lexical-innovation proxy (borrowing versus native). Without external context, models perform only slightly above chance on borrowing classification, so we construct a linguistic knowledge graph that encodes donor language, morphological patterns, and lexical analogues, and inject instance-specific subgraphs into the prompt. Knowledge-graph prompts raise borrowing classification accuracy from 25 -- 35% up to 71 -- 81% and largely close the gap between small and large models, while leaving neology detection difficult and sensitive to few-shot design. Our results show that lexicon-aware prompting is highly beneficial for robust borrowing judgments in low-resource contact languages and that lexical resources can serve as structured context for LLM evaluation. This study was carried out within the ENEOLI COST Action and examines borrowing as a form of lexical innovation in multilingual Luxembourgish data.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has improved substantially in recent years, yet performance remains limited for low-resource languages. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for improving ASR through generative error correction (GER), but their effectiveness in low-resource settings remains underexplored. In addition, it remains unclear to what extent data contamination influences the reported improvements in LLM-based GER. This study investigates LLM-based GER for low-resource Frisian. In addition to a public corpus, we construct and use a Frisian offline dataset with non-public texts for evaluation to control for potential data contamination. Results show that GER improves ASR performance in most settings, with the best GPT-5.1 results surpassing oracle WERs. Comparable gains on the offline dataset indicate that improvements reflect true correction ability. We further provide a detailed error analysis revealing model correction patterns.

The preservation and interpretation of cultural heritage increasingly rely on digital technologies, among which Knowledge Graphs (KGs) stand out for their ability to structure vast amounts of data. However, the construction and expansion of these KGs often face challenges due to the diverse and complex nature of cultural heritage information. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for extending KG resources in the domain of cultural heritage, which we applied to French data. First, we introduce a new knowledge graph in the domain of French cultural heritage, WJoconde, which is distinguished by its multimodality as it integrates both textual and image information of the entities. We further introduce three variants of WJoconde to facilitate downstream research, such as Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). We also built a comprehensive benchmark for KGC methods on our dataset. Second, we propose a new framework for extending cultural heritage KGs using multi-modal approaches leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which includes automated data extraction from unstructured resources combined with a special validation pipeline for grounding the output of both models, to further extend WJoconde. Our results show that by integrating the rich text and image information in cultural heritage data, we can efficiently enhance KGs with high reliability. We open-source all code and benchmark datasets with text and images, as well as the original data with an interactive access point

Recent advances in Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) promise zero-shot forecasting capabilities with minimal task-specific training. While these models have shown strong performance across generic benchmarks, their applicability in volatile, complex electricity markets remains underexplored. Addressing this gap, this study provides a systematic empirical evaluation of several TSFMs, specifically Chronos-2 and Chronos-Bolt (developed by Amazon), and TimesFM 2.5 (provided by Google), for forecasting Belgian day-ahead and imbalance electricity prices. For both considered markets, Chronos-2 in ARX mode produces the most accurate forecasts. Compared with the best ensemble prediction from other machine learning methods, Chronos-2's Mean Absolute Error (MAE) is 5% lower for the day-ahead market. In contrast, the model yields 10% higher MAE predicting imbalance prices across all forecast horizons, except for the two-hour-ahead horizon. Moreover, we find that TSFMs exhibit genuine zero-shot forecasting skills but still struggle under extreme market conditions.

We describe the first experiment of conversion of Lexicon-Grammar tables for French verbs into the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) format. The Lexicon-Grammar of the French language is currently one of the major sources of lexical and syntactic information for French. Its conversion into an interoperable representation format according to the LMF standard makes it usable in different contexts, thus contributing to the standardization and interoperability of natural language processing dictionaries. We briefly introduce the Lexicon-Grammar and the derived dictionaries; we analyse the main difficulties faced during the conversion; and we describe the resulting resource.

Cross-lingual transfer has become a central paradigm for extending natural language processing (NLP) technologies to low-resource languages. By leveraging supervision from high-resource languages, multilingual language models can achieve strong task performance with little or no labeled target-language data. However, it remains unclear to what extent cross-lingual transfer can substitute for language-specific efforts. In this paper, we synthesize prior research findings and data collection results on Luxembourgish, which, despite its typological proximity to high-resource languages and its presence in a multilingual context, remains insufficiently represented in modern NLP technologies. Across findings, we observe a fundamental interdependence between cross-lingual transfer and language-specific efforts. Cross-lingual transfer can substantially improve target-language performance, but its success depends critically on the availability of sufficiently high-quality, task-aligned target-language data. At the same time, such resources, particularly in low-resource settings, are typically too limited in scale to drive strong performance on their own. Instead, such resources reach their full potential only when leveraged within a cross-lingual framework. We therefore argue that cross-lingual transfer and language-specific efforts should not be viewed as competing alternatives. Instead, they function as complementary components of a sustainable low-resource NLP pipeline. Based on these insights, we provide practical guidelines for integrating and balancing cross-lingual transfer with language-specific development in sustainable low-resource NLP pipelines.

Large language models (LLMs) can convincingly imitate human writing styles, yet it remains unclear how much stylistic information is encoded in embeddings from any language model and retained after LLM rewriting. We investigate these questions in French, using a controlled literary dataset to quantify the effect of stylistic variation via changes in embedding dispersion. We observe that embeddings reliably capture authorial stylistic features and that these signals persist after rewriting, while also exhibiting LLM-specific patterns. These analytical results offer promising directions for authorship imitation detection in the era of language models.

We develop a foundation model using 1.2m high resolution satellite images of the Netherlands. By combining a Convolutional Neural Network and a Vision Transformer, the model captures both low- and high-frequency landscape features, such as fine textures, edges, and small objects as well as large terrain structures, elevation patterns, and land-cover distributions. Leveraging temporal data as input, the model learns from broader contextual information across time, allowing the model to exploit the temporal dependencies, such as topographic features, land-cover changes, and seasonal dynamics. These additional constraints reduce feature ambiguity, improve representation learning, and enable better generalization with fewer labeled samples. The foundation model is evaluated on multiple downstream tasks, ranging from use cases within the Netherlands to global benchmarking datasets. On the vegetation monitoring dataset of the Netherlands, the model shows clear performance improvements by incorporating temporal information instead of relying on a single time point. Despite using a smaller model and less pretraining data limited to the Netherlands, it achieves competitive results on global benchmarks when compared to state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate that the model can learn rich, generalizable representations from limited data, achieving competitive performance on global benchmarks while using a fraction of the parameters of larger state-of-the-art remote sensing models. To maximize reproducibility and reuse, we made the scripts and the model accessible on GitHub.

Gender bias in large language models has primarily been investigated for English, while languages with grammatical or morphological gender remain comparatively understudied. This paper investigates how and when gender information emerges in a Dutch BERT model trained from scratch, offering one of the first checkpoint-level analyses of bias formation in a Transformer architecture for a language combining overt morphological gender marking and generic forms. By extracting contextual embeddings throughout training, we construct dynamic gender subspaces using linear SVMs to trace when gender becomes linearly encoded and how this encoding evolves over time. Contextual embeddings are often assumed to integrate contextual cues robustly, allowing models to adjust the representation of a word depending on its more local usage. We therefore test whether explicit gender cues in controlled sentence templates (e.g., Zij is een loodgieter ('She is a plumber')) can override learned statistical associations (plumber -> male). Our findings challenge this assumption: although gender becomes clearly linearly separable around epoch 20 and is distributed across multiple embedding dimensions, the model struggles to update its internal gender representation in light of explicit contextual cues in short sentence templates. Stereotypical gender-profession pairings are predicted far more accurately than anti-stereotypical ones, and generic forms in Dutch systematically default to a male interpretation, even when the context explicitly denotes a female referent. Together, our results seem to indicate that contextualization in the representations learned by our Dutch BERT model is not sufficiently dynamic along the probed gender direction: explicit gender cues in anti-stereotypical contexts are not reliably reflected in the resulting representations, resulting in persistent male-default behaviour.

The performance of end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems enables their increasing integration into numerous applications. While there are various benefits to such speech-to-text systems, the choice of hyperparameters and models plays a crucial role in their performance. Typically, these choices are determined by considering only the character (CER) and/or word error rate (WER) metrics. However, it has been shown in several studies that these metrics are largely incomplete and fail to adequately describe the downstream application of automatic transcripts. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative study on the French language that investigates the impact of subword tokenization algorithms and self-supervised learning models from different linguistic and acoustic perspectives, using a comprehensive set of evaluation metrics.

Detecting language ideologies is a valuable yet complex task for understanding how identities are constructed through discourse. In Luxembourg's multicultural and multilingual society, language ideologies reflect more than simple preferences: they carry deep cultural and social meanings, shaping identities and social belonging. Following recent developments in applying Natural Language Processing tools to linguistics and social science, this paper explores the potential of large language models to assist in the detection of language ideologies. We manually annotate a corpus of user comments in Luxembourgish with predefined ideological categories and then evaluate the performance of large language models under varying prompt conditions to assess their ability to replicate these human annotations. Since Luxembourgish is a small language and poorly represented in the LLMs' training data, we also investigate whether machine-translating the data to high-resource languages increases performance on the ideology detection task. Our findings suggest that, while LLMs are not yet fully optimized for a multi-class ideological annotation task, they are practical tools to identify language ideological content.

Cross-Lingual Text Simplification (CLTS) aims to make content more accessible across languages by simultaneously addressing both linguistic complexity and translation. This study investigates the effectiveness of different prompting strategies for CLTS between English and French using large language models (LLMs). We examine five distinct prompting systems: a direct prompt instructing the LLM to perform both translation and simplification simultaneously, two Composition approaches that either translate-then-simplify or simplify-then-translate within a single prompt, and two decomposition approaches that perform the same operations in separate, consecutive prompts. These systems are evaluated across a diverse set of five corpora of different genres (Wikipedia and medical texts) using seven state-of-the-art LLMs. Output quality is assessed through a multi-faceted evaluation framework comprising automatic metrics, comprehensive linguistic feature analysis, and human evaluation of simplicity and meaning preservation. Our findings reveal that while direct prompting consistently achieves the highest BLEU scores, indicating meaning fidelity, Translate-then-Simplify approaches demonstrate the highest simplicity, as measured by the linguistic features.

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.

Research shows news consumption differs across demographics, yet little is known about non-mainstream audiences, especially in relation to local media. Our study addresses this gap by examining how French-speaking migrants in a mid-size European city engage with local news, and whether their needs are reflected in coverage. Eight community members participated in focus groups, whose insights guided the selection of natural language processing methods (topic modeling, information retrieval, sentiment analysis, and readability) applied to over 2000 hyper-local news articles. Results showed that while articles frequently covered local events, gaps remained in topics important to participants. Sentiment analysis revealed a generally positive tone, and readability measures indicated an intermediate-advanced French level, raising questions about accessibility for integration. Our work contributes to bridging the gap between local news platforms' content and diverse readers' needs, and could inform local media organizations about opportunities to expand their current news story coverage to appeal to more diverse audiences.

Applying computational methods to law at scale requires separating genuine legal reasoning from surface similarity. We study this through a concrete task: detecting implicit citations of the French Civil Code, where a court applies a statutory rule without naming it: a post-hoc question about the reasoning a court actually used. We release a benchmark of 1,015 passage-article pairs annotated by three legal experts. Our central finding is that their disagreement is itself informative: the third of cases the experts dispute are where models fail. Our best ensemble reaches an F1 score of 0.70 overall. Yet, two-thirds of its false positives fall on those disputed cases, a concentration that holds across all ten models we evaluate. Disagreement is a signal of intrinsic difficulty, not annotation noise. This should not block useful tools, however: reframed as top-$k$ ranking with multi-model consensus, the same signals reach 76% precision for the top-200 candidates without supervision.

We present LightOnOCR-2-1B, a 1B-parameter end-to-end multilingual vision--language model that converts document images (e.g., PDFs) into clean, naturally ordered text without brittle OCR pipelines. Trained on a large-scale, high-quality distillation mix with strong coverage of scans, French documents, and scientific PDFs, LightOnOCR-2 achieves state-of-the-art results on OlmOCR-Bench while being 9$\times$ smaller and substantially faster than prior best-performing models. We further extend the output format to predict normalized bounding boxes for embedded images, introducing localization during pretraining via a resume strategy and refining it with RLVR using IoU-based rewards. Finally, we improve robustness with checkpoint averaging and task-arithmetic merging. We release model checkpoints under Apache 2.0, and publicly release the dataset and LightOnOCR-bbox-bench evaluation under their respective licenses.

Quantization is widely adopted to reduce the computational cost of large language models (LLMs); however, its implications for fairness and safety, particularly in dynamic quantization and multilingual contexts, remain underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of how static and dynamic quantization methods impact fairness and safety across benchmarks measuring intrinsic and extrinsic bias and safety alignment. For fairness, we evaluate English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Turkish; for safety, we focus on English, Korean, and Arabic. Our findings reveal that quantization consistently degrades fairness and safety, with dynamic methods demonstrating greater stability than static ones. Moreover, fairness degradation varies across languages, while safety deterioration is especially pronounced in non-English settings. To address these risks, we introduce Critical Weight Protection, a novel technique that identifies and preserves fairness- and safety-critical weights during quantization. This approach effectively mitigates bias and safety deterioration without costly retraining or alignment, maintaining trustworthiness while retaining efficiency.

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 ($\leq$15B 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.

We introduce FLAME (FLemish Accounts of Momentary Experiences), a corpus of nearly 25,000 personal narratives in Belgian-Dutch (Flemish), collected through experience sampling to support Natural Language Processing (NLP) research on an underrepresented variety. Such everyday narratives are rich in culturally grounded themes, but their informal register and low-resource setting make thematic extraction hard. Comparing K-Means, LDA, and BERTopic, we find that human evaluation favors BERTopic, which produces the most coherent, culturally resonant topics. FLAME, thereby, offers a new resource for studying everyday language use in a low-resource variety.