Daily Papers

Data scarcity in low-resource languages can be addressed with word-to-word translations from labeled task data in high-resource languages using bilingual lexicons. However, bilingual lexicons often have limited lexical overlap with task data, which results in poor translation coverage and lexicon utilization. We propose lexicon-conditioned data generation (LexC-Gen), a method that generates low-resource-language classification task data at scale. Specifically, LexC-Gen first uses high-resource-language words from bilingual lexicons to generate lexicon-compatible task data, and then it translates them into low-resource languages with bilingual lexicons via word translation. Across 17 extremely low-resource languages, LexC-Gen generated data is competitive with expert-translated gold data, and yields on average 5.6 and 8.9 points improvement over existing lexicon-based word translation methods on sentiment analysis and topic classification tasks respectively. We show that conditioning on bilingual lexicons is the key component of LexC-Gen. LexC-Gen is also practical -- it only needs a single GPU to generate data at scale. It works well with open-access LLMs, and its cost is one-fifth of the cost of GPT4-based multilingual data generation.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages, such as those in the Finno-Ugric family, significantly underrepresented. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on V\~oro, Livonian, and Komi. We cover almost the entire cycle of LLM creation, from data collection to instruction tuning and evaluation. Our contributions include developing multilingual base and instruction-tuned models; creating evaluation benchmarks, including the smugri-MT-bench multi-turn conversational benchmark; and conducting human evaluation. We intend for this work to promote linguistic diversity, ensuring that lesser-resourced languages can benefit from advancements in NLP.

While multilingual language models like XLM-R have advanced multilingualism in NLP, they still perform poorly in extremely low-resource languages. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that modern LLMs such as LLaMA and Qwen support far fewer languages than XLM-R, making text generation models non-existent for many languages in the world. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel framework for adapting multilingual encoders to text generation in extremely low-resource languages. By reusing the weights between the encoder and the decoder, our framework allows the model to leverage the learned semantic space of the encoder, enabling efficient learning and effective generalization in low-resource languages. Applying this framework to four Chinese minority languages, we present XLM-SWCM, and demonstrate its superior performance on various downstream tasks even when compared with much larger models.

Democratizing access to natural language processing (NLP) technology is crucial, especially for underrepresented and extremely low-resource languages. Previous research has focused on developing labeled and unlabeled corpora for these languages through online scraping and document translation. While these methods have proven effective and cost-efficient, we have identified limitations in the resulting corpora, including a lack of lexical diversity and cultural relevance to local communities. To address this gap, we conduct a case study on Indonesian local languages. We compare the effectiveness of online scraping, human translation, and paragraph writing by native speakers in constructing datasets. Our findings demonstrate that datasets generated through paragraph writing by native speakers exhibit superior quality in terms of lexical diversity and cultural content. In addition, we present the benchmark, encompassing 12 underrepresented and extremely low-resource languages spoken by millions of individuals in Indonesia. Our empirical experiment results using existing multilingual large language models conclude the need to extend these models to more underrepresented languages. We release the NusaWrites dataset at https://github.com/IndoNLP/nusa-writes.

Efficiently and accurately translating a corpus into a low-resource language remains a challenge, regardless of the strategies employed, whether manual, automated, or a combination of the two. Many Christian organizations are dedicated to the task of translating the Holy Bible into languages that lack a modern translation. Bible translation (BT) work is currently underway for over 3000 extremely low resource languages. We introduce the eBible corpus: a dataset containing 1009 translations of portions of the Bible with data in 833 different languages across 75 language families. In addition to a BT benchmarking dataset, we introduce model performance benchmarks built on the No Language Left Behind (NLLB) neural machine translation (NMT) models. Finally, we describe several problems specific to the domain of BT and consider how the established data and model benchmarks might be used for future translation efforts. For a BT task trained with NLLB, Austronesian and Trans-New Guinea language families achieve 35.1 and 31.6 BLEU scores respectively, which spurs future innovations for NMT for low-resource languages in Papua New Guinea.

Extremely low-resource (XLR) languages lack substantial corpora for training NLP models, motivating the use of all available resources such as dictionaries and grammar books. Machine Translation from One Book (Tanzer et al., 2024) suggests that prompting long-context LLMs with one grammar book enables English-Kalamang translation, an XLR language unseen by LLMs - a noteworthy case of linguistics helping an NLP task. We investigate the source of this translation ability, finding almost all improvements stem from the book's parallel examples rather than its grammatical explanations. We find similar results for Nepali and Guarani, seen low-resource languages, and we achieve performance comparable to an LLM with a grammar book by simply fine-tuning an encoder-decoder translation model. We then investigate where grammar books help by testing two linguistic tasks, grammaticality judgment and gloss prediction, and we explore what kind of grammatical knowledge helps by introducing a typological feature prompt that achieves leading results on these more relevant tasks. We thus emphasise the importance of task-appropriate data for XLR languages: parallel examples for translation, and grammatical data for linguistic tasks. As we find no evidence that long-context LLMs can make effective use of grammatical explanations for XLR translation, we conclude data collection for multilingual XLR tasks such as translation is best focused on parallel data over linguistic description.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on high-resource languages, leaving extremely low-resource languages like Irish with limited representation. This work presents UCCIX, a pioneering effort on the development of an open-source Irish-based LLM. We propose a novel framework for continued pre-training of LLMs specifically adapted for extremely low-resource languages, requiring only a fraction of the textual data typically needed for training LLMs according to scaling laws. Our model, based on Llama 2-13B, outperforms much larger models on Irish language tasks with up to 12% performance improvement, showcasing the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. We also contribute comprehensive Irish benchmarking datasets, including IrishQA, a question-answering dataset, and Irish version of MT-bench. These datasets enable rigorous evaluation and facilitate future research in Irish LLM systems. Our work aims to preserve and promote the Irish language, knowledge, and culture of Ireland in the digital era while providing a framework for adapting LLMs to other indigenous languages.

We propose a new benchmark to measure a language model's linguistic reasoning skills without relying on pre-existing language-specific knowledge. The test covers 894 questions grouped in 160 problems across 75 (mostly) extremely low-resource languages, extracted from the International Linguistic Olympiad corpus. To attain high accuracy on this benchmark, models don't need previous knowledge of the tested language, as all the information needed to solve the linguistic puzzle is presented in the context. We find that, while all analyzed models rank below 25% accuracy, there is a significant gap between open and closed models, with the best-performing proprietary model at 24.05% and the best-performing open model at 8.84%.

This study addresses the widening gap in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) research between high resource and extremely low resource languages, with a particular focus on Manchu, a critically endangered language. Manchu exemplifies the challenges faced by marginalized linguistic communities in accessing state-of-the-art technologies. In a pioneering effort, we introduce the first-ever Manchu ASR model ManWav, leveraging Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53. The results of the first Manchu ASR is promising, especially when trained with our augmented data. Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 fine-tuned with augmented data demonstrates a 0.02 drop in CER and 0.13 drop in WER compared to the same base model fine-tuned with original data.

Words have been represented in a high-dimensional vector space that encodes their semantic similarities, enabling downstream applications such as retrieving synonyms, antonyms, and relevant contexts. However, despite recent advances in multilingual language models (LMs), the effectiveness of these models' representations in semantic retrieval contexts has not been comprehensively explored. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the MINERS, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of multilingual LMs in semantic retrieval tasks, including bitext mining and classification via retrieval-augmented contexts. We create a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of LMs in retrieving samples across over 200 diverse languages, including extremely low-resource languages in challenging cross-lingual and code-switching settings. Our results demonstrate that by solely retrieving semantically similar embeddings yields performance competitive with state-of-the-art approaches, without requiring any fine-tuning.

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages typically involves continual pre-training (CT) followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this CT-then-SFT approach struggles with limited data in the context of low-resource languages, failing to balance language modeling and task-solving capabilities. We thus propose model merging as an alternative for low-resource languages, combining models with distinct capabilities into a single model without additional training. We use model merging to develop task-solving LLMs for low-resource languages without SFT data in the target languages. Our experiments based on Llama-2-7B demonstrate that model merging effectively endows LLMs for low-resource languages with task-solving abilities, outperforming CT-then-SFT in scenarios with extremely scarce data. Observing performance saturation in model merging with more training tokens, we further analyze the merging process and introduce a slack variable to the model merging algorithm to mitigate the loss of important parameters, thereby enhancing performance. We hope that model merging can benefit more human languages suffering from data scarcity with its higher data efficiency.

Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) have pushed the quality of machine translation systems to the point where they are becoming widely adopted to build competitive systems. However, there is still a large number of languages that are yet to reap the benefits of NMT. In this paper, we provide the first large-scale case study of the practical application of MT in the Turkic language family in order to realize the gains of NMT for Turkic languages under high-resource to extremely low-resource scenarios. In addition to presenting an extensive analysis that identifies the bottlenecks towards building competitive systems to ameliorate data scarcity, our study has several key contributions, including, i) a large parallel corpus covering 22 Turkic languages consisting of common public datasets in combination with new datasets of approximately 2 million parallel sentences, ii) bilingual baselines for 26 language pairs, iii) novel high-quality test sets in three different translation domains and iv) human evaluation scores. All models, scripts, and data will be released to the public.

Evaluating machine translation (MT) quality for under-resourced African languages remains a significant challenge, as existing metrics often suffer from limited language coverage and poor performance in low-resource settings. While recent efforts, such as AfriCOMET, have addressed some of the issues, they are still constrained by small evaluation sets, a lack of publicly available training data tailored to African languages, and inconsistent performance in extremely low-resource scenarios. In this work, we introduce SSA-MTE, a large-scale human-annotated MT evaluation (MTE) dataset covering 13 African language pairs from the News domain, with over 63,000 sentence-level annotations from a diverse set of MT systems. Based on this data, we develop SSA-COMET and SSA-COMET-QE, improved reference-based and reference-free evaluation metrics. We also benchmark prompting-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4o and Claude. Our experimental results show that SSA-COMET models significantly outperform AfriCOMET and are competitive with the strongest LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) evaluated in our study, particularly on low-resource languages such as Twi, Luo, and Yoruba. All resources are released under open licenses to support future research.

The use of subword embedding has proved to be a major innovation in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). It helps NMT to learn better context vectors for Low Resource Languages (LRLs) so as to predict the target words by better modelling the morphologies of the two languages and also the morphosyntax transfer. Even so, their performance for translation in Indian language to Indian language scenario is still not as good as for resource-rich languages. One reason for this is the relative morphological richness of Indian languages, while another is that most of them fall into the extremely low resource or zero-shot categories. Since most major Indian languages use Indic or Brahmi origin scripts, the text written in them is highly phonetic in nature and phonetically similar in terms of abstract letters and their arrangements. We use these characteristics of Indian languages and their scripts to propose an approach based on common multilingual Latin-based encodings (WX notation) that take advantage of language similarity while addressing the morphological complexity issue in NMT. These multilingual Latin-based encodings in NMT, together with Byte Pair Embedding (BPE) allow us to better exploit their phonetic and orthographic as well as lexical similarities to improve the translation quality by projecting different but similar languages on the same orthographic-phonetic character space. We verify the proposed approach by demonstrating experiments on similar language pairs (Gujarati-Hindi, Marathi-Hindi, Nepali-Hindi, Maithili-Hindi, Punjabi-Hindi, and Urdu-Hindi) under low resource conditions. The proposed approach shows an improvement in a majority of cases, in one case as much as ~10 BLEU points compared to baseline techniques for similar language pairs. We also get up to ~1 BLEU points improvement on distant and zero-shot language pairs.

Natural Question Answering (QA) datasets play a crucial role in evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), ensuring their effectiveness in real-world applications. Despite the numerous QA datasets that have been developed, there is a notable lack of region-specific datasets generated by native users in their own languages. This gap hinders the effective benchmarking of LLMs for regional and cultural specificities. Furthermore, it also limits the development of fine-tuned models. In this study, we propose a scalable, language-independent framework, NativQA, to seamlessly construct culturally and regionally aligned QA datasets in native languages, for LLM evaluation and tuning. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework by designing a multilingual natural QA dataset, \mnqa, consisting of ~64k manually annotated QA pairs in seven languages, ranging from high to extremely low resource, based on queries from native speakers from 9 regions covering 18 topics. We benchmark open- and closed-source LLMs with the MultiNativQA dataset. We also showcase the framework efficacy in constructing fine-tuning data especially for low-resource and dialectally-rich languages. We made both the framework NativQA and MultiNativQA dataset publicly available for the community (https://nativqa.gitlab.io).

This paper introduces three self-contained data augmentation methods for low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Our techniques first generate novel text--using gloss-based replacement, random replacement, or an LLM-based approach--and then apply Text-to-Speech (TTS) to produce synthetic audio. We apply these methods, which leverage only the original annotated data, to four languages with extremely limited resources (Vatlongos, Nashta, Shinekhen Buryat, and Kakabe). Fine-tuning a pretrained Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 model on a combination of the original audio and generated synthetic data yields significant performance gains, including a 14.3% absolute WER reduction for Nashta. The methods prove effective across all four low-resource languages and also show utility for high-resource languages like English, demonstrating their broad applicability.

This paper presents Killkan, the first dataset for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the Kichwa language, an indigenous language of Ecuador. Kichwa is an extremely low-resource endangered language, and there have been no resources before Killkan for Kichwa to be incorporated in applications of natural language processing. The dataset contains approximately 4 hours of audio with transcription, translation into Spanish, and morphosyntactic annotation in the format of Universal Dependencies. The audio data was retrieved from a publicly available radio program in Kichwa. This paper also provides corpus-linguistic analyses of the dataset with a special focus on the agglutinative morphology of Kichwa and frequent code-switching with Spanish. The experiments show that the dataset makes it possible to develop the first ASR system for Kichwa with reliable quality despite its small dataset size. This dataset, the ASR model, and the code used to develop them will be publicly available. Thus, our study positively showcases resource building and its applications for low-resource languages and their community.

In its daily use, the Indonesian language is riddled with informality, that is, deviations from the standard in terms of vocabulary, spelling, and word order. On the other hand, current available Indonesian NLP models are typically developed with the standard Indonesian in mind. In this work, we address a style-transfer from informal to formal Indonesian as a low-resource machine translation problem. We build a new dataset of parallel sentences of informal Indonesian and its formal counterpart. We benchmark several strategies to perform style transfer from informal to formal Indonesian. We also explore augmenting the training set with artificial forward-translated data. Since we are dealing with an extremely low-resource setting, we find that a phrase-based machine translation approach outperforms the Transformer-based approach. Alternatively, a pre-trained GPT-2 fined-tuned to this task performed equally well but costs more computational resource. Our findings show a promising step towards leveraging machine translation models for style transfer. Our code and data are available in https://github.com/haryoa/stif-indonesia

Code-switching, also called code-mixing, is the linguistics phenomenon where in casual settings, multilingual speakers mix words from different languages in one utterance. Due to its spontaneous nature, code-switching is extremely low-resource, which makes it a challenging problem for language and speech processing tasks. In such contexts, Code-Switching Language Identification (CSLID) becomes a difficult but necessary task if we want to maximally leverage existing monolingual tools for other tasks. In this work, we propose two novel approaches toward improving language identification accuracy on an English-Mandarin child-directed speech dataset. Our methods include a stacked Residual CNN+GRU model and a multitask pre-training approach to use Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as an auxiliary task for CSLID. Due to the low-resource nature of code-switching, we also employ careful silver data creation using monolingual corpora in both languages and up-sampling as data augmentation. We focus on English-Mandarin code-switched data, but our method works on any language pair. Our best model achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.781 on a real English-Mandarin code-switching child-directed speech corpus and outperforms the previous baseline by 55.3%.

Cherokee is a highly endangered Native American language spoken by the Cherokee people. The Cherokee culture is deeply embedded in its language. However, there are approximately only 2,000 fluent first language Cherokee speakers remaining in the world, and the number is declining every year. To help save this endangered language, we introduce ChrEn, a Cherokee-English parallel dataset, to facilitate machine translation research between Cherokee and English. Compared to some popular machine translation language pairs, ChrEn is extremely low-resource, only containing 14k sentence pairs in total. We split our parallel data in ways that facilitate both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation. We also collect 5k Cherokee monolingual data to enable semi-supervised learning. Besides these datasets, we propose several Cherokee-English and English-Cherokee machine translation systems. We compare SMT (phrase-based) versus NMT (RNN-based and Transformer-based) systems; supervised versus semi-supervised (via language model, back-translation, and BERT/Multilingual-BERT) methods; as well as transfer learning versus multilingual joint training with 4 other languages. Our best results are 15.8/12.7 BLEU for in-domain and 6.5/5.0 BLEU for out-of-domain Chr-En/EnChr translations, respectively, and we hope that our dataset and systems will encourage future work by the community for Cherokee language revitalization. Our data, code, and demo will be publicly available at https://github.com/ZhangShiyue/ChrEn

Recent advances in the field of abstractive summarization leverage pre-trained language models rather than train a model from scratch. However, such models are sluggish to train and accompanied by a massive overhead. Researchers have proposed a few lightweight alternatives such as smaller adapters to mitigate the drawbacks. Nonetheless, it remains uncertain whether using adapters benefits the task of summarization, in terms of improved efficiency without an unpleasant sacrifice in performance. In this work, we carry out multifaceted investigations on fine-tuning and adapters for summarization tasks with varying complexity: language, domain, and task transfer. In our experiments, fine-tuning a pre-trained language model generally attains a better performance than using adapters; the performance gap positively correlates with the amount of training data used. Notably, adapters exceed fine-tuning under extremely low-resource conditions. We further provide insights on multilinguality, model convergence, and robustness, hoping to shed light on the pragmatic choice of fine-tuning or adapters in abstractive summarization.

Historical and linguistic connections within the Sinosphere have led researchers to use Classical Chinese resources for cross-lingual transfer when processing historical documents from Korea and Japan. In this paper, we question the assumption of cross-lingual transferability from Classical Chinese to Hanja and Kanbun, the ancient written languages of Korea and Japan, respectively. Our experiments across machine translation, named entity recognition, and punctuation restoration tasks show minimal impact of Classical Chinese datasets on language model performance for ancient Korean documents written in Hanja, with performance differences within 0.0068 F1-score for sequence labeling tasks and up to +0.84 BLEU score for translation. These limitations persist consistently across various model sizes, architectures, and domain-specific datasets. Our analysis reveals that the benefits of Classical Chinese resources diminish rapidly as local language data increases for Hanja, while showing substantial improvements only in extremely low-resource scenarios for both Korean and Japanese historical documents. These mixed results emphasize the need for careful empirical validation rather than assuming benefits from indiscriminate cross-lingual transfer.

Building effective neural machine translation (NMT) models for very low-resourced and morphologically rich African indigenous languages is an open challenge. Besides the issue of finding available resources for them, a lot of work is put into preprocessing and tokenization. Recent studies have shown that standard tokenization methods do not always adequately deal with the grammatical, diacritical, and tonal properties of some African languages. That, coupled with the extremely low availability of training samples, hinders the production of reliable NMT models. In this paper, using Fon language as a case study, we revisit standard tokenization methods and introduce Word-Expressions-Based (WEB) tokenization, a human-involved super-words tokenization strategy to create a better representative vocabulary for training. Furthermore, we compare our tokenization strategy to others on the Fon-French and French-Fon translation tasks.

To scale neural speech synthesis to various real-world languages, we present a multilingual end-to-end framework that maps byte inputs to spectrograms, thus allowing arbitrary input scripts. Besides strong results on 40+ languages, the framework demonstrates capabilities to adapt to new languages under extreme low-resource and even few-shot scenarios of merely 40s transcribed recording, without the need of per-language resources like lexicon, extra corpus, auxiliary models, or linguistic expertise, thus ensuring scalability. While it retains satisfactory intelligibility and naturalness matching rich-resource models. Exhaustive comparative and ablation studies are performed to reveal the potential of the framework for low-resource languages. Furthermore, we propose a novel method to extract language-specific sub-networks in a multilingual model for a better understanding of its mechanism.

Low-Resource Languages (LRLs) present significant challenges in natural language processing due to their limited linguistic resources and underrepresentation in standard datasets. While recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have substantially improved translation capabilities for high-resource languages, performance disparities persist for LRLs, particularly impacting privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained scenarios. This paper systematically evaluates the limitations of current LLMs across 200 languages using benchmarks such as FLORES-200. We also explore alternative data sources, including news articles and bilingual dictionaries, and demonstrate how knowledge distillation from large pre-trained models can significantly improve smaller LRL translations. Additionally, we investigate various fine-tuning strategies, revealing that incremental enhancements markedly reduce performance gaps on smaller LLMs.

Low-resource languages face significant challenges due to the lack of sufficient linguistic data, resources, and tools for tasks such as supervised learning, annotation, and classification. This shortage hinders the development of accurate models and datasets, making it difficult to perform critical NLP tasks like sentiment analysis or hate speech detection. To bridge this gap, Large Language Models (LLMs) present an opportunity for potential annotators, capable of generating datasets and resources for these underrepresented languages. In this paper, we focus on Marathi, a low-resource language, and evaluate the performance of both closed-source and open-source LLMs as annotators. We assess models such as GPT-4o and Gemini 1.0 Pro, Gemma 2 (2B and 9B), and Llama 3.1 (8B) on classification tasks including sentiment analysis, news classification, and hate speech detection. Our findings reveal that while LLMs excel in annotation tasks for high-resource languages like English, they still fall short when applied to Marathi. Even advanced closed models like Gemini and GPT underperform in comparison to BERT-based baselines, highlighting the limitations of LLMs as annotators for low-resource languages.

Human brains integrate linguistic and perceptual information simultaneously to understand natural language, and hold the critical ability to render imaginations. Such abilities enable us to construct new abstract concepts or concrete objects, and are essential in involving practical knowledge to solve problems in low-resource scenarios. However, most existing methods for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) are mainly focused on textual signals. They do not simulate human visual imagination ability, which hinders models from inferring and learning efficiently from limited data samples. Therefore, we introduce an Imagination-Augmented Cross-modal Encoder (iACE) to solve natural language understanding tasks from a novel learning perspective -- imagination-augmented cross-modal understanding. iACE enables visual imagination with external knowledge transferred from the powerful generative and pre-trained vision-and-language models. Extensive experiments on GLUE and SWAG show that iACE achieves consistent improvement over visually-supervised pre-trained models. More importantly, results in extreme and normal few-shot settings validate the effectiveness of iACE in low-resource natural language understanding circumstances.

Machine Translation has made impressive progress in recent years offering close to human-level performance on many languages, but studies have primarily focused on high-resource languages with broad online presence and resources. With the help of growing Large Language Models, more and more low-resource languages achieve better results through the presence of other languages. However, studies have shown that not all low-resource languages can benefit from multilingual systems, especially those with insufficient training and evaluation data. In this paper, we revisit state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation techniques to develop automatic translation systems between German and Bavarian. We investigate conditions of low-resource languages such as data scarcity and parameter sensitivity and focus on refined solutions that combat low-resource difficulties and creative solutions such as harnessing language similarity. Our experiment entails applying Back-translation and Transfer Learning to automatically generate more training data and achieve higher translation performance. We demonstrate noisiness in the data and present our approach to carry out text preprocessing extensively. Evaluation was conducted using combined metrics: BLEU, chrF and TER. Statistical significance results with Bonferroni correction show surprisingly high baseline systems, and that Back-translation leads to significant improvement. Furthermore, we present a qualitative analysis of translation errors and system limitations.

Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects systemic problems in society. In this paper, we focus on the task of Machine Translation (MT), that plays a crucial role for information accessibility and communication worldwide. Despite immense improvements in MT over the past decade, MT is centered around a few high-resourced languages. As MT researchers cannot solve the problem of low-resourcedness alone, we propose participatory research as a means to involve all necessary agents required in the MT development process. We demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of participatory research with a case study on MT for African languages. Its implementation leads to a collection of novel translation datasets, MT benchmarks for over 30 languages, with human evaluations for a third of them, and enables participants without formal training to make a unique scientific contribution. Benchmarks, models, data, code, and evaluation results are released under https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane-mt.

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest in natural language processing (NLP), particularly their remarkable performance in various downstream tasks in resource-rich languages. Recent studies have highlighted the limitations of LLMs in low-resource languages, primarily focusing on binary classification tasks and giving minimal attention to South Asian languages. These limitations are primarily attributed to constraints such as dataset scarcity, computational costs, and research gaps specific to low-resource languages. To address this gap, we present datasets for sentiment and hate speech tasks by translating from English to Bangla, Hindi, and Urdu, facilitating research in low-resource language processing. Further, we comprehensively examine zero-shot learning using multiple LLMs in English and widely spoken South Asian languages. Our findings indicate that GPT-4 consistently outperforms Llama 2 and Gemini, with English consistently demonstrating superior performance across diverse tasks compared to low-resource languages. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that natural language inference (NLI) exhibits the highest performance among the evaluated tasks, with GPT-4 demonstrating superior capabilities.

Low-resource languages, by its very definition, tend to be under represented in the pre-training corpora of Large Language Models. In this work, we investigate three low-resource cross-lingual approaches that enable an LLM adapt to tasks in previously unseen languages. Llama-2 is an LLM where Indic languages, among many other language families, contribute to less than 0.005% of the total 2 trillion token pre-training corpora. In this work, we experiment with the English-dominated Llama-2 for cross-lingual transfer to three Indic languages, Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil as target languages. We study three approaches for cross-lingual transfer, under ICL and fine-tuning. One, we find that adding additional supervisory signals via a dominant language in the LLM, leads to improvements, both under in-context learning and fine-tuning. Two, adapting the target languages to word reordering may be beneficial under ICL, but its impact diminishes with fine tuning. Finally, continued pre-training in one low-resource language can improve model performance for other related low-resource languages.

Large-scale pre-trained language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the massive size of these models poses huge challenges for their deployment in real-world applications. While numerous model compression techniques have been proposed, most of them are not well-suited for achieving extreme model compression when there is a significant gap in model scale. In this paper, we introduce a novel compression paradigm called Retrieval-based Knowledge Transfer (RetriKT), which effectively transfers the knowledge of LLMs to extremely small-scale models (e.g., 1%). In particular, our approach extracts knowledge from LLMs to construct a knowledge store, from which the small-scale model can retrieve relevant information and leverage it for effective inference. To improve the quality of the model, soft prompt tuning and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) reinforcement learning techniques are employed. Extensive experiments are conducted on low-resource tasks from SuperGLUE and GLUE benchmarks. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly enhances the performance of small-scale models by leveraging the knowledge from LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating human languages. However, low-resource languages are left behind due to the unavailability of resources. In this work, we focus on enhancing the LLaMA-2-Amharic model by integrating task-specific and generative datasets to improve language model performance for Amharic. We compile an Amharic instruction fine-tuning dataset and fine-tuned LLaMA-2-Amharic model. The fine-tuned model shows promising results in different NLP tasks. We open-source our dataset creation pipeline, instruction datasets, trained models, and evaluation outputs to promote language-specific studies on these models.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has increasing utility in the modern world. There are a many ASR models available for languages with large amounts of training data like English. However, low-resource languages are poorly represented. In response we create and release an open-licensed and formatted dataset of audio recordings of the Bible in low-resource northern Indian languages. We setup multiple experimental splits and train and analyze two competitive ASR models to serve as the baseline for future research using this data.

JamPatoisNLI provides the first dataset for natural language inference in a creole language, Jamaican Patois. Many of the most-spoken low-resource languages are creoles. These languages commonly have a lexicon derived from a major world language and a distinctive grammar reflecting the languages of the original speakers and the process of language birth by creolization. This gives them a distinctive place in exploring the effectiveness of transfer from large monolingual or multilingual pretrained models. While our work, along with previous work, shows that transfer from these models to low-resource languages that are unrelated to languages in their training set is not very effective, we would expect stronger results from transfer to creoles. Indeed, our experiments show considerably better results from few-shot learning of JamPatoisNLI than for such unrelated languages, and help us begin to understand how the unique relationship between creoles and their high-resource base languages affect cross-lingual transfer. JamPatoisNLI, which consists of naturally-occurring premises and expert-written hypotheses, is a step towards steering research into a traditionally underserved language and a useful benchmark for understanding cross-lingual NLP.

Unlike mainstream languages (such as English and French), low-resource languages often suffer from a lack of expert-annotated corpora and benchmark resources that make it hard to apply state-of-the-art techniques directly. In this paper, we alleviate this scarcity problem for the low-resourced Filipino language in two ways. First, we introduce a new benchmark language modeling dataset in Filipino which we call WikiText-TL-39. Second, we show that language model finetuning techniques such as BERT and ULMFiT can be used to consistently train robust classifiers in low-resource settings, experiencing at most a 0.0782 increase in validation error when the number of training examples is decreased from 10K to 1K while finetuning using a privately-held sentiment dataset.

With the success of large-scale pre-training and multilingual modeling in Natural Language Processing (NLP), recent years have seen a proliferation of large, web-mined text datasets covering hundreds of languages. We manually audit the quality of 205 language-specific corpora released with five major public datasets (CCAligned, ParaCrawl, WikiMatrix, OSCAR, mC4). Lower-resource corpora have systematic issues: At least 15 corpora have no usable text, and a significant fraction contains less than 50% sentences of acceptable quality. In addition, many are mislabeled or use nonstandard/ambiguous language codes. We demonstrate that these issues are easy to detect even for non-proficient speakers, and supplement the human audit with automatic analyses. Finally, we recommend techniques to evaluate and improve multilingual corpora and discuss potential risks that come with low-quality data releases.

For machine translation, a vast majority of language pairs in the world are considered low-resource because they have little parallel data available. Besides the technical challenges of learning with limited supervision, it is difficult to evaluate methods trained on low-resource language pairs because of the lack of freely and publicly available benchmarks. In this work, we introduce the FLoRes evaluation datasets for Nepali-English and Sinhala-English, based on sentences translated from Wikipedia. Compared to English, these are languages with very different morphology and syntax, for which little out-of-domain parallel data is available and for which relatively large amounts of monolingual data are freely available. We describe our process to collect and cross-check the quality of translations, and we report baseline performance using several learning settings: fully supervised, weakly supervised, semi-supervised, and fully unsupervised. Our experiments demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods perform rather poorly on this benchmark, posing a challenge to the research community working on low-resource MT. Data and code to reproduce our experiments are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/flores.

Low-resource languages (LRLs) face significant challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to limited data. While current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) still struggle with LRLs, smaller multilingual models (mLMs) such as mBERT and XLM-R offer greater promise due to a better fit of their capacity to low training data sizes. This study systematically investigates parameter-efficient adapter-based methods for adapting mLMs to LRLs, evaluating three architectures: Sequential Bottleneck, Invertible Bottleneck, and Low-Rank Adaptation. Using unstructured text from GlotCC and structured knowledge from ConceptNet, we show that small adaptation datasets (e.g., up to 1 GB of free-text or a few MB of knowledge graph data) yield gains in intrinsic (masked language modeling) and extrinsic tasks (topic classification, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition). We find that Sequential Bottleneck adapters excel in language modeling, while Invertible Bottleneck adapters slightly outperform other methods on downstream tasks due to better embedding alignment and larger parameter counts. Adapter-based methods match or outperform full fine-tuning while using far fewer parameters, and smaller mLMs prove more effective for LRLs than massive LLMs like LLaMA-3, GPT-4, and DeepSeek-R1-based distilled models. While adaptation improves performance, pre-training data size remains the dominant factor, especially for languages with extensive pre-training coverage.

Part of speech tagging in zero-resource settings can be an effective approach for low-resource languages when no labeled training data is available. Existing systems use two main techniques for POS tagging i.e. pretrained multilingual large language models(LLM) or project the source language labels into the zero resource target language and train a sequence labeling model on it. We explore the latter approach using the off-the-shelf alignment module and train a hidden Markov model(HMM) to predict the POS tags. We evaluate transfer learning setup with English as a source language and French, German, and Spanish as target languages for part-of-speech tagging. Our conclusion is that projected alignment data in zero-resource language can be beneficial to predict POS tags.

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese. Without foundational digital resources for African languages, which are considered low-resource in the digital context, these advanced tools remain out of reach. This work details the AI4D - African Language Program, a 3-part project that 1) incentivised the crowd-sourcing, collection and curation of language datasets through an online quantitative and qualitative challenge, 2) supported research fellows for a period of 3-4 months to create datasets annotated for NLP tasks, and 3) hosted competitive Machine Learning challenges on the basis of these datasets. Key outcomes of the work so far include 1) the creation of 9+ open source, African language datasets annotated for a variety of ML tasks, and 2) the creation of baseline models for these datasets through hosting of competitive ML challenges.

The "massively-multilingual" training of multilingual models is known to limit their utility in any one language, and they perform particularly poorly on low-resource languages. However, there is evidence that low-resource languages can benefit from targeted multilinguality, where the model is trained on closely related languages. To test this approach more rigorously, we systematically study best practices for adapting a pre-trained model to a language family. Focusing on the Uralic family as a test case, we adapt XLM-R under various configurations to model 15 languages; we then evaluate the performance of each experimental setting on two downstream tasks and 11 evaluation languages. Our adapted models significantly outperform mono- and multilingual baselines. Furthermore, a regression analysis of hyperparameter effects reveals that adapted vocabulary size is relatively unimportant for low-resource languages, and that low-resource languages can be aggressively up-sampled during training at little detriment to performance in high-resource languages. These results introduce new best practices for performing language adaptation in a targeted setting.

Despite much progress in recent years, the vast majority of work in natural language processing (NLP) is on standard languages with many speakers. In this work, we instead focus on low-resource languages and in particular non-standardized low-resource languages. Even within branches of major language families, often considered well-researched, little is known about the extent and type of available resources and what the major NLP challenges are for these language varieties. The first step to address this situation is a systematic survey of available corpora (most importantly, annotated corpora, which are particularly valuable for NLP research). Focusing on Germanic low-resource language varieties, we provide such a survey in this paper. Except for geolocation (origin of speaker or document), we find that manually annotated linguistic resources are sparse and, if they exist, mostly cover morphosyntax. Despite this lack of resources, we observe that interest in this area is increasing: there is active development and a growing research community. To facilitate research, we make our overview of over 80 corpora publicly available. We share a companion website of this overview at https://github.com/mainlp/germanic-lrl-corpora .

Large language models (LLMs) are known to effectively perform tasks by simply observing few exemplars. However, in low-resource languages, obtaining such hand-picked exemplars can still be challenging, where unsupervised techniques may be necessary. Moreover, competent generative capabilities of LLMs are observed only in high-resource languages, while their performances among under-represented languages fall behind due to pre-training data imbalance. To elicit LLMs' ability onto low-resource languages without any supervised data, we propose to assemble synthetic exemplars from a diverse set of high-resource languages to prompt the LLMs to translate from any language into English. These prompts are then used to create intra-lingual exemplars to perform tasks in the target languages. Our unsupervised prompting method performs on par with supervised few-shot learning in LLMs of different sizes for translations between English and 13 Indic and 21 African low-resource languages. We also show that fine-tuning a 7B model on data generated from our method helps it perform competitively with a 175B model. In non-English translation tasks, our method even outperforms supervised prompting by up to 3 chrF++ in many low-resource languages. When evaluated on zero-shot multilingual summarization, our method surpasses other English-pivoting baselines by up to 4 ROUGE-L and is also favored by GPT-4.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the field of automated code generation. LLMs rely on large and diverse datasets to learn syntax, semantics, and usage patterns of programming languages. For low-resource languages (i.e., niche programming languages characterized by the scarcity of training data), the limited availability of such data hampers the models' ability to generalize effectively, resulting in poorer code generation performance as compared to high-resource languages. For this reason, there is a quest for techniques able to close this performance gap. We present an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of several approaches for boosting LLMs' performance on low-resource languages, namely: (i) a classic fine-tuning, which is however capped in size by the scarcity of training data; (ii) three variants of in-context learning, with prompts crafted to provide the LLM with additional information about the low-resource language (e.g., few-shot examples showcasing features of the targeted language); and (iii) a pre-training objective teaching the model how to translate between high- and low-resource languages. The context of our study are two low-resource languages (R and Racket) and six LLMs having different architectures and sizes. Our findings reveal that a fine-tuning is usually the best choice for smaller LLMs, possibly due to the fact that even a small dataset is sufficient to train their limited number of parameters. With the increase in size of the models, in-context learning becomes more and more effective, representing a safe and cheap bet (i.e., it always helps, but with different magnitudes). Differently, very large LLMs may deteriorate their performance on low-resource languages when fine-tuning is performed, possibly due to the lack of enough data needed to effectively update their weights.

Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languages. Additionally, many low-resource languages (e.g. African languages) are often evaluated only on basic text classification tasks due to the lack of appropriate or comprehensive benchmarks outside of high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce IrokoBench -- a human-translated benchmark dataset for 16 typologically-diverse low-resource African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference~(AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning~(AfriMGSM), and multi-choice knowledge-based QA~(AfriMMLU). We use IrokoBench to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and translate-test settings~(where test sets are translated into English) across 10 open and four proprietary LLMs. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between high-resource languages~(such as English and French) and low-resource African languages. We observe a significant performance gap between open and proprietary models, with the highest performing open model, Aya-101 only at 58\% of the best-performing proprietary model GPT-4o performance. Machine translating the test set to English before evaluation helped to close the gap for larger models that are English-centric, like LLaMa 3 70B. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to develop and adapt LLMs for African languages.

Recent advances in the pre-training of language models leverage large-scale datasets to create multilingual models. However, low-resource languages are mostly left out in these datasets. This is primarily because many widely spoken languages are not well represented on the web and therefore excluded from the large-scale crawls used to create datasets. Furthermore, downstream users of these models are restricted to the selection of languages originally chosen for pre-training. This work investigates how to optimally leverage existing pre-trained models to create low-resource translation systems for 16 African languages. We focus on two questions: 1) How can pre-trained models be used for languages not included in the initial pre-training? and 2) How can the resulting translation models effectively transfer to new domains? To answer these questions, we create a new African news corpus covering 16 languages, of which eight languages are not part of any existing evaluation dataset. We demonstrate that the most effective strategy for transferring both to additional languages and to additional domains is to fine-tune large pre-trained models on small quantities of high-quality translation data.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in a wide range of natural language applications. However, they often struggle to recognize low-resource languages, in particular African languages, which are not well represented in large training corpora. In this paper, we consider how to adapt LLMs to low-resource African languages. We find that combining curated data from African languages with high-quality English educational texts results in a training mix that substantially improves the model's performance on these languages. On the challenging IrokoBench dataset, our models consistently achieve the best performance amongst similarly sized baselines, particularly on knowledge-intensive multiple-choice questions (AfriMMLU). Additionally, on the cross-lingual question answering benchmark AfriQA, our models outperform the base model by over 10%. To better understand the role of English data during training, we translate a subset of 200M tokens into Swahili language and perform an analysis which reveals that the content of these data is primarily responsible for the strong performance. We release our models and data to encourage future research on African languages.

Pre-trained language models have revolutionized the natural language understanding landscape, most notably BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). However, a significant challenge remains for low-resource languages, where limited data hinders the effective training of such models. This work presents a novel approach to bridge this gap by transferring BERT capabilities from high-resource to low-resource languages using vocabulary matching. We conduct experiments on the Silesian and Kashubian languages and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to improve the performance of BERT models even when the target language has minimal training data. Our results highlight the potential of the proposed technique to effectively train BERT models for low-resource languages, thus democratizing access to advanced language understanding models.

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable human-like capability in various domains and languages. However, a notable quality gap arises in low-resource languages, e.g., Indonesian indigenous languages, rendering them ineffective and inefficient in such linguistic contexts. To bridge this quality gap, we introduce Cendol, a collection of Indonesian LLMs encompassing both decoder-only and encoder-decoder architectures across a range of model sizes. We highlight Cendol's effectiveness across a diverse array of tasks, attaining 20% improvement, and demonstrate its capability to generalize to unseen tasks and indigenous languages of Indonesia. Furthermore, Cendol models showcase improved human favorability despite their limitations in capturing indigenous knowledge and cultural values in Indonesia. In addition, we discuss the shortcomings of parameter-efficient tunings, such as LoRA, for language adaptation. Alternatively, we propose the usage of vocabulary adaptation to enhance efficiency. Lastly, we evaluate the safety of Cendol and showcase that safety in pre-training in one language such as English is transferable to low-resource languages, such as Indonesian, even without RLHF and safety fine-tuning.

With the advent of Deep Learning based Artificial Neural Networks models, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed significant improvements in textual data processing in terms of its efficiency and accuracy. However, the research is mostly restricted to high-resource languages such as English and low-resource languages still suffer from a lack of available resources in terms of training datasets as well as models with even baseline evaluation results. Considering the limited availability of resources for low-resource languages, we propose a methodology for adapting self-attentive transformer-based architecture models (mBERT, mT5) for low-resource summarization, supplemented by the construction of a new baseline dataset (76.5k article, summary pairs) in a low-resource language Urdu. Choosing news (a publicly available source) as the application domain has the potential to make the proposed methodology useful for reproducing in other languages with limited resources. Our adapted summarization model urT5 with up to 44.78\% reduction in size as compared to mT5 can capture contextual information of low resource language effectively with evaluation score (up to 46.35 ROUGE-1, 77 BERTScore) at par with state-of-the-art models in high resource language English (PEGASUS: 47.21, BART: 45.14 on XSUM Dataset). The proposed method provided a baseline approach towards extractive as well as abstractive summarization with competitive evaluation results in a limited resource setup.

While machine translation evaluation has been studied primarily for high-resource languages, there has been a recent interest in evaluation for low-resource languages due to the increasing availability of data and models. In this paper, we focus on a zero-shot evaluation setting focusing on low-resource Indian languages, namely Assamese, Kannada, Maithili, and Punjabi. We collect sufficient Multi-Dimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and Direct Assessment (DA) annotations to create test sets and meta-evaluate a plethora of automatic evaluation metrics. We observe that even for learned metrics, which are known to exhibit zero-shot performance, the Kendall Tau and Pearson correlations with human annotations are only as high as 0.32 and 0.45. Synthetic data approaches show mixed results and overall do not help close the gap by much for these languages. This indicates that there is still a long way to go for low-resource evaluation.

It is very challenging to work with low-resource languages due to the inadequate availability of data. Using a dictionary to map independently trained word embeddings into a shared vector space has proved to be very useful in learning bilingual embeddings in the past. Here we have tried to map individual embeddings of words in English and their corresponding translated words in low-resource languages like Estonian, Slovenian, Slovakian, and Hungarian. We have used a supervised learning approach. We report accuracy scores through various retrieval strategies which show that it is possible to approach challenging tasks in Natural Language Processing like machine translation for such languages, provided that we have at least some amount of proper bilingual data. We also conclude that we can follow an unsupervised learning path on monolingual text data as that is more suitable for low-resource languages.

Scaling multilingual representation learning beyond the hundred most frequent languages is challenging, in particular to cover the long tail of low-resource languages. A promising approach has been to train one-for-all multilingual models capable of cross-lingual transfer, but these models often suffer from insufficient capacity and interference between unrelated languages. Instead, we move away from this approach and focus on training multiple language (family) specific representations, but most prominently enable all languages to still be encoded in the same representational space. To achieve this, we focus on teacher-student training, allowing all encoders to be mutually compatible for bitext mining, and enabling fast learning of new languages. We introduce a new teacher-student training scheme which combines supervised and self-supervised training, allowing encoders to take advantage of monolingual training data, which is valuable in the low-resource setting. Our approach significantly outperforms the original LASER encoder. We study very low-resource languages and handle 50 African languages, many of which are not covered by any other model. For these languages, we train sentence encoders, mine bitexts, and validate the bitexts by training NMT systems.

In this paper, we present the first multilingual FAQ dataset publicly available. We collected around 6M FAQ pairs from the web, in 21 different languages. Although this is significantly larger than existing FAQ retrieval datasets, it comes with its own challenges: duplication of content and uneven distribution of topics. We adopt a similar setup as Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and test various bi-encoders on this dataset. Our experiments reveal that a multilingual model based on XLM-RoBERTa achieves the best results, except for English. Lower resources languages seem to learn from one another as a multilingual model achieves a higher MRR than language-specific ones. Our qualitative analysis reveals the brittleness of the model on simple word changes. We publicly release our dataset, model and training script.

Low-resource speech recognition has been long-suffering from insufficient training data. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages neighboring languages to improve low-resource scenario performance, founded on the hypothesis that similar linguistic units in neighboring languages exhibit comparable term frequency distributions, which enables us to construct a Huffman tree for performing multilingual hierarchical Softmax decoding. This hierarchical structure enables cross-lingual knowledge sharing among similar tokens, thereby enhancing low-resource training outcomes. Empirical analyses demonstrate that our method is effective in improving the accuracy and efficiency of low-resource speech recognition.

The recent proliferation of Large Conversation Language Models has highlighted the economic significance of widespread access to this type of AI technologies in the current information age. Nevertheless, prevailing models have primarily been trained on corpora consisting of documents written in popular languages. The dearth of such cutting-edge tools for low-resource languages further exacerbates their underrepresentation in the current economic landscape, thereby impacting their native speakers. This paper introduces two novel resources designed to enhance Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Galician language. We present a Galician adaptation of the Alpaca dataset, comprising 52,000 instructions and demonstrations. This dataset proves invaluable for enhancing language models by fine-tuning them to more accurately adhere to provided instructions. Additionally, as a demonstration of the dataset utility, we fine-tuned LLaMA-7B to comprehend and respond in Galician, a language not originally supported by the model, by following the Alpaca format. This work contributes to the research on multilingual models tailored for low-resource settings, a crucial endeavor in ensuring the inclusion of all linguistic communities in the development of Large Language Models. Another noteworthy aspect of this research is the exploration of how knowledge of a closely related language, in this case, Portuguese, can assist in generating coherent text when training resources are scarce. Both the Galician Alpaca dataset and Cabuxa-7B are publicly accessible on our Huggingface Hub, and we have made the source code available to facilitate replication of this experiment and encourage further advancements for underrepresented languages.

High-resource language models often fall short in the African context, where there is a critical need for models that are efficient, accessible, and locally relevant, even amidst significant computing and data constraints. This paper introduces InkubaLM, a small language model with 0.4 billion parameters, which achieves performance comparable to models with significantly larger parameter counts and more extensive training data on tasks such as machine translation, question-answering, AfriMMLU, and the AfriXnli task. Notably, InkubaLM outperforms many larger models in sentiment analysis and demonstrates remarkable consistency across multiple languages. This work represents a pivotal advancement in challenging the conventional paradigm that effective language models must rely on substantial resources. Our model and datasets are publicly available \url{https://huggingface.co/lelapa} to encourage research and development on low-resource languages.

For many low-resource languages, the only available language models are large multilingual models trained on many languages simultaneously. However, using FLORES perplexity as a metric, we find that these models perform worse than bigrams for many languages (e.g. 24% of languages in XGLM 4.5B; 43% in BLOOM 7.1B). To facilitate research that focuses on low-resource languages, we pre-train and release Goldfish, a suite of monolingual autoregressive Transformer language models up to 125M parameters for 350 languages. The Goldfish reach lower FLORES perplexities than BLOOM, XGLM, and MaLA-500 on 98 of 204 FLORES languages, despite each Goldfish model being over 10x smaller. However, the Goldfish significantly underperform larger multilingual models on reasoning benchmarks, suggesting that for low-resource languages, multilinguality primarily improves general reasoning abilities rather than basic text generation. We release models trained on 5MB (350 languages), 10MB (288 languages), 100MB (166 languages), and 1GB (83 languages) of text data where available. The Goldfish models are available as baselines, fine-tuning sources, or augmentations to existing models in low-resource NLP research, and they are further useful for crosslinguistic studies requiring maximally comparable models across languages.

Driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale, machine translation has solidified itself as a key focus of artificial intelligence research today. However, such efforts have coalesced around a small subset of languages, leaving behind the vast majority of mostly low-resource languages. What does it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe, high quality results, all while keeping ethical considerations in mind? In No Language Left Behind, we took on this challenge by first contextualizing the need for low-resource language translation support through exploratory interviews with native speakers. Then, we created datasets and models aimed at narrowing the performance gap between low and high-resource languages. More specifically, we developed a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages. We propose multiple architectural and training improvements to counteract overfitting while training on thousands of tasks. Critically, we evaluated the performance of over 40,000 different translation directions using a human-translated benchmark, Flores-200, and combined human evaluation with a novel toxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translation safety. Our model achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the previous state-of-the-art, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system. Finally, we open source all contributions described in this work, accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq/tree/nllb.

Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of tasks, including in multimodal settings such as speech. However, their evaluation is often limited to English and a few high-resource languages. For low-resource languages, there is no standardized evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing mSTEB, a new benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on a wide range of tasks covering language identification, text classification, question answering, and translation tasks on both speech and text modalities. We evaluated the performance of leading LLMs such as Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o (Audio) and state-of-the-art open models such as Qwen 2 Audio and Gemma 3 27B. Our evaluation shows a wide gap in performance between high-resource and low-resource languages, especially for languages spoken in Africa and Americas/Oceania. Our findings show that more investment is needed to address their under-representation in LLMs coverage.

This research article examines the effectiveness of various pretraining strategies for developing machine translation models tailored to low-resource languages. Although this work considers several low-resource languages, including Afrikaans, Swahili, and Zulu, the translation model is specifically developed for Lingala, an under-resourced African language, building upon the pretraining approach introduced by Reid and Artetxe (2021), originally designed for high-resource languages. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, we explore different pretraining methodologies, including the integration of multiple languages and the use of both monolingual and parallel data during the pretraining phase. Our findings indicate that pretraining on multiple languages and leveraging both monolingual and parallel data significantly enhance translation quality. This study offers valuable insights into effective pretraining strategies for low-resource machine translation, helping to bridge the performance gap between high-resource and low-resource languages. The results contribute to the broader goal of developing more inclusive and accurate NLP models for marginalized communities and underrepresented populations. The code and datasets used in this study are publicly available to facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, with the exception of certain data that may no longer be accessible due to changes in public availability.

Transformer based architectures have shown notable results on many down streaming tasks including question answering. The availability of data, on the other hand, impedes obtaining legitimate performance for low-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of pre-trained multilingual models to improve the performance of question answering in low-resource languages. We tested four combinations of language and task adapters using multilingual transformer architectures on seven languages similar to MLQA dataset. Additionally, we have also proposed zero-shot transfer learning of low-resource question answering using language and task adapters. We observed that stacking the language and the task adapters improves the multilingual transformer models' performance significantly for low-resource languages.

In NLP, zero-shot classification (ZSC) is the task of assigning labels to textual data without any labeled examples for the target classes. A common method for ZSC is to fine-tune a language model on a Natural Language Inference (NLI) dataset and then use it to infer the entailment between the input document and the target labels. However, this approach faces certain challenges, particularly for languages with limited resources. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution that leverages dictionaries as a source of data for ZSC. We focus on Luxembourgish, a low-resource language spoken in Luxembourg, and construct two new topic relevance classification datasets based on a dictionary that provides various synonyms, word translations and example sentences. We evaluate the usability of our dataset and compare it with the NLI-based approach on two topic classification tasks in a zero-shot manner. Our results show that by using the dictionary-based dataset, the trained models outperform the ones following the NLI-based approach for ZSC. While we focus on a single low-resource language in this study, we believe that the efficacy of our approach can also transfer to other languages where such a dictionary is available.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, largely due to their generalisability and ability to perform tasks without additional training. However, their effectiveness for low-resource languages remains limited. In this study, we evaluate the performance of 55 publicly available LLMs on Maltese, a low-resource language, using a newly introduced benchmark covering 11 discriminative and generative tasks. Our experiments highlight that many models perform poorly, particularly on generative tasks, and that smaller fine-tuned models often perform better across all tasks. From our multidimensional analysis, we investigate various factors impacting performance. We conclude that prior exposure to Maltese during pre-training and instruction-tuning emerges as the most important factor. We also examine the trade-offs between fine-tuning and prompting, highlighting that while fine-tuning requires a higher initial cost, it yields better performance and lower inference costs. Through this work, we aim to highlight the need for more inclusive language technologies and recommend that researchers working with low-resource languages consider more "traditional" language modelling approaches.

Large language models (LLMs) implicitly learn to perform a range of language tasks, including machine translation (MT). Previous studies explore aspects of LLMs' MT capabilities. However, there exist a wide variety of languages for which recent LLM MT performance has never before been evaluated. Without published experimental evidence on the matter, it is difficult for speakers of the world's diverse languages to know how and whether they can use LLMs for their languages. We present the first experimental evidence for an expansive set of 204 languages, along with MT cost analysis, using the FLORES-200 benchmark. Trends reveal that GPT models approach or exceed traditional MT model performance for some high-resource languages (HRLs) but consistently lag for low-resource languages (LRLs), under-performing traditional MT for 84.1% of languages we covered. Our analysis reveals that a language's resource level is the most important feature in determining ChatGPT's relative ability to translate it, and suggests that ChatGPT is especially disadvantaged for LRLs and African languages.

Natural language processing (NLP) has a significant impact on society via technologies such as machine translation and search engines. Despite its success, NLP technology is only widely available for high-resource languages such as English and Chinese, while it remains inaccessible to many languages due to the unavailability of data resources and benchmarks. In this work, we focus on developing resources for languages in Indonesia. Despite being the second most linguistically diverse country, most languages in Indonesia are categorized as endangered and some are even extinct. We develop the first-ever parallel resource for 10 low-resource languages in Indonesia. Our resource includes datasets, a multi-task benchmark, and lexicons, as well as a parallel Indonesian-English dataset. We provide extensive analyses and describe the challenges when creating such resources. We hope that our work can spark NLP research on Indonesian and other underrepresented languages.

Sentence embedding models play a key role in various Natural Language Processing tasks, such as in Topic Modeling, Document Clustering and Recommendation Systems. However, these models rely heavily on parallel data, which can be scarce for many low-resource languages, including Luxembourgish. This scarcity results in suboptimal performance of monolingual and cross-lingual sentence embedding models for these languages. To address this issue, we compile a relatively small but high-quality human-generated cross-lingual parallel dataset to train \tool, an enhanced sentence embedding model for Luxembourgish with strong cross-lingual capabilities. Additionally, we present evidence suggesting that including low-resource languages in parallel training datasets can be more advantageous for other low-resource languages than relying solely on high-resource language pairs. Furthermore, recognizing the lack of sentence embedding benchmarks for low-resource languages, we create a paraphrase detection benchmark specifically for Luxembourgish, aiming to partially fill this gap and promote further research.

Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese etc. Over 97% of the world's 7000 languages, including African languages, are low resourced for NLP i.e. they have little or no data, tools, and techniques for NLP research. For instance, only 5 out of 2965, 0.19% authors of full text papers in the ACL Anthology extracted from the 5 major conferences in 2018 ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLING and CoNLL, are affiliated to African institutions. In this work, we discuss our effort toward building a standard machine translation benchmark dataset for Igbo, one of the 3 major Nigerian languages. Igbo is spoken by more than 50 million people globally with over 50% of the speakers are in southeastern Nigeria. Igbo is low resourced although there have been some efforts toward developing IgboNLP such as part of speech tagging and diacritic restoration

Large language models (LLMs) under-perform on low-resource languages due to limited training data. We present a method to efficiently collect text data for low-resource languages from the entire Common Crawl corpus. Our approach, UnifiedCrawl, filters and extracts common crawl using minimal compute resources, yielding mono-lingual datasets much larger than previously available sources. We demonstrate that leveraging this data to fine-tuning multilingual LLMs via efficient adapter methods (QLoRA) significantly boosts performance on the low-resource language, while minimizing VRAM usage. Our experiments show large improvements in language modeling perplexity and an increase in few-shot prompting scores. Our work and released source code provide an affordable approach to improve LLMs for low-resource languages using consumer hardware. Our source code is available here at https://github.com/bethelmelesse/unifiedcrawl.

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM -- multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge'ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark -- a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly bringing advances to Natural Language Processing. However, low-resource languages, those lacking extensive prominence in datasets for various NLP tasks, or where existing datasets are not as substantial, such as Portuguese, already obtain several benefits from LLMs, but not to the same extent. LLMs trained on multilingual datasets normally struggle to respond to prompts in Portuguese satisfactorily, presenting, for example, code switching in their responses. This work proposes a fine-tuned LLaMA 2-based model for Portuguese prompts named Bode in two versions: 7B and 13B. We evaluate the performance of this model in classification tasks using the zero-shot approach with in-context learning, and compare it with other LLMs. Our main contribution is to bring an LLM with satisfactory results in the Portuguese language, as well as to provide a model that is free for research or commercial purposes.

Low-resource machine translation remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), which often lack exposure to these languages during pretraining and have limited parallel data for fine-tuning. We propose a novel approach that enhances translation for low-resource languages by integrating an external dictionary tool and training models end-to-end using reinforcement learning, in addition to supervised fine-tuning. Focusing on the Spanish-Wayuunaiki language pair, we frame translation as a tool-augmented decision-making problem in which the model can selectively consult a bilingual dictionary during generation. Our method combines supervised instruction tuning with Guided Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling the model to learn both when and how to use the tool effectively. BLEU similarity scores are used as rewards to guide this learning process. Preliminary results show that our tool-augmented models achieve up to +3.37 BLEU improvement over previous work, and a 18% relative gain compared to a supervised baseline without dictionary access, on the Spanish-Wayuunaiki test set from the AmericasNLP 2025 Shared Task. We also conduct ablation studies to assess the effects of model architecture and training strategy, comparing Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct with other models such as LLaMA and a prior NLLB-based system. These findings highlight the promise of combining LLMs with external tools and the role of reinforcement learning in improving translation quality in low-resource language settings.

In recent years, multilingual machine translation models have achieved promising performance on low-resource language pairs by sharing information between similar languages, thus enabling zero-shot translation. To overcome the "curse of multilinguality", these models often opt for scaling up the number of parameters, which makes their use in resource-constrained environments challenging. We introduce SMaLL-100, a distilled version of the M2M-100 (12B) model, a massively multilingual machine translation model covering 100 languages. We train SMaLL-100 with uniform sampling across all language pairs and therefore focus on preserving the performance of low-resource languages. We evaluate SMaLL-100 on different low-resource benchmarks: FLORES-101, Tatoeba, and TICO-19 and demonstrate that it outperforms previous massively multilingual models of comparable sizes (200-600M) while improving inference latency and memory usage. Additionally, our model achieves comparable results to M2M-100 (1.2B), while being 3.6x smaller and 4.3x faster at inference. Code and pre-trained models: https://github.com/alirezamshi/small100

Multilingual language models are widely used to extend NLP systems to low-resource languages. However, concrete evidence for the effects of multilinguality on language modeling performance in individual languages remains scarce. Here, we pre-train over 10,000 monolingual and multilingual language models for over 250 languages, including multiple language families that are under-studied in NLP. We assess how language modeling performance in each language varies as a function of (1) monolingual dataset size, (2) added multilingual dataset size, (3) linguistic similarity of the added languages, and (4) model size (up to 45M parameters). We find that in moderation, adding multilingual data improves low-resource language modeling performance, similar to increasing low-resource dataset sizes by up to 33%. Improvements depend on the syntactic similarity of the added multilingual data, with marginal additional effects of vocabulary overlap. However, high-resource languages consistently perform worse in multilingual pre-training scenarios. As dataset sizes increase, adding multilingual data begins to hurt performance for both low-resource and high-resource languages, likely due to limited model capacity (the "curse of multilinguality"). These results suggest that massively multilingual pre-training may not be optimal for any languages involved, but that more targeted models can significantly improve performance.

In Africa, and the world at large, there is an increasing focus on developing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems to overcome language barriers. NMT for Low-resource language is particularly compelling as it involves learning with limited labelled data. However, obtaining a well-aligned parallel corpus for low-resource languages can be challenging. The disparity between the technological advancement of a few global languages and the lack of research on NMT for local languages in Chad is striking. End-to-end NMT trials on low-resource Chad languages have not been attempted. Additionally, there is a dearth of online and well-structured data gathering for research in Natural Language Processing, unlike some African languages. However, a guided approach for data gathering can produce bitext data for many Chadian language translation pairs with well-known languages that have ample data. In this project, we created the first sba-Fr Dataset, which is a corpus of Ngambay-to-French translations, and fine-tuned three pre-trained models using this dataset. Our experiments show that the M2M100 model outperforms other models with high BLEU scores on both original and original+synthetic data. The publicly available bitext dataset can be used for research purposes.

Neural machine translation (NMT) for low-resource local languages in Indonesia faces significant challenges, including the need for a representative benchmark and limited data availability. This work addresses these challenges by comprehensively analyzing training NMT systems for four low-resource local languages in Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese, Minangkabau, and Balinese. Our study encompasses various training approaches, paradigms, data sizes, and a preliminary study into using large language models for synthetic low-resource languages parallel data generation. We reveal specific trends and insights into practical strategies for low-resource language translation. Our research demonstrates that despite limited computational resources and textual data, several of our NMT systems achieve competitive performances, rivaling the translation quality of zero-shot gpt-3.5-turbo. These findings significantly advance NMT for low-resource languages, offering valuable guidance for researchers in similar contexts.

We study the selection of transfer languages for automatic abusive language detection. Instead of preparing a dataset for every language, we demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning for zero-shot abusive language detection. This way we can use existing data from higher-resource languages to build better detection systems for low-resource languages. Our datasets are from seven different languages from three language families. We measure the distance between the languages using several language similarity measures, especially by quantifying the World Atlas of Language Structures. We show that there is a correlation between linguistic similarity and classifier performance. This discovery allows us to choose an optimal transfer language for zero shot abusive language detection.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), yet open-source multilingual LLMs remain scarce, with existing models often limited in language coverage. Such models typically prioritize well-resourced languages, while widely spoken but under-resourced languages are often overlooked. To address this disparity, we introduce Babel, an open multilingual LLM that covers the top 25 languages by number of speakers, supports over 90% of the global population, and includes many languages neglected by other open multilingual LLMs. Unlike traditional continue pretraining approaches, Babel expands its parameter count through a layer extension technique that elevates Babel's performance ceiling. We introduce two variants: Babel-9B, designed for efficient inference and fine-tuning, and Babel-83B, which sets a new standard for open multilingual LLMs. Extensive evaluations on multilingual tasks demonstrate its superior performance compared to open LLMs of comparable size. In addition, using open-source supervised fine-tuning datasets, Babel achieves remarkable performance, with Babel-9B-Chat leading among 10B-sized LLMs and Babel-83B-Chat setting a new standard for multilingual tasks, reaching the same level of commercial models.

Large-scale corpora play a vital role in the construction of large language models (LLMs). However, existing LLMs exhibit limited abilities in understanding low-resource languages, including the minority languages in China, due to a lack of training data. To improve the accessibility of these languages, we present MC^2, a Multilingual Corpus of Minority Languages in China, which is the largest open-source corpus so far. It encompasses four underrepresented languages, i.e., Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh in the Kazakh Arabic script, and Mongolian in the traditional Mongolian script. Notably, two writing systems in MC^2 are long neglected in previous corpora. As we identify serious contamination in the low-resource language split in the existing multilingual corpora, we propose a quality-centric solution for collecting MC^2, prioritizing quality and accuracy while enhancing representativeness and diversity. By in-depth analysis, we demonstrate the new research challenges MC^2 brings, such as long-text modeling and multiplicity of writing systems. We hope MC^2 can help enhance the equity of the underrepresented languages in China and provide a reliable data foundation for further research on low-resource languages.

For many tasks, state-of-the-art results have been achieved with Transformer-based architectures, resulting in a paradigmatic shift in practices from the use of task-specific architectures to the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models. The ongoing trend consists in training models with an ever-increasing amount of data and parameters, which requires considerable resources. It leads to a strong search to improve resource efficiency based on algorithmic and hardware improvements evaluated only for English. This raises questions about their usability when applied to small-scale learning problems, for which a limited amount of training data is available, especially for under-resourced languages tasks. The lack of appropriately sized corpora is a hindrance to applying data-driven and transfer learning-based approaches with strong instability cases. In this paper, we establish a state-of-the-art of the efforts dedicated to the usability of Transformer-based models and propose to evaluate these improvements on the question-answering performances of French language which have few resources. We address the instability relating to data scarcity by investigating various training strategies with data augmentation, hyperparameters optimization and cross-lingual transfer. We also introduce a new compact model for French FrALBERT which proves to be competitive in low-resource settings.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional promise in translation tasks for high-resource languages. However, their performance in low-resource languages is limited by the scarcity of both parallel and monolingual corpora, as well as the presence of noise. Consequently, such LLMs suffer with alignment and have lagged behind State-of-The-Art (SoTA) neural machine translation (NMT) models in these settings. This paper introduces NusaMT-7B, an LLM-based machine translation model for low-resource Indonesian languages, starting with Balinese and Minangkabau. Leveraging the pretrained LLaMA2-7B, our approach integrates continued pre-training on monolingual data, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), self-learning, and an LLM-based data cleaner to reduce noise in parallel sentences. In the FLORES-200 multilingual translation benchmark, NusaMT-7B outperforms SoTA models in the spBLEU metric by up to +6.69 spBLEU in translations into Balinese and Minangkabau, but underperforms by up to -3.38 spBLEU in translations into higher-resource languages. Our results show that fine-tuned LLMs can enhance translation quality for low-resource languages, aiding in linguistic preservation and cross-cultural communication.

Recent progress in text classification has been focused on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. For low-resource languages, amongst them most African languages, the lack of well-annotated data and effective preprocessing, is hindering the progress and the transfer of successful methods. In this paper, we introduce two news datasets (KINNEWS and KIRNEWS) for multi-class classification of news articles in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two low-resource African languages. The two languages are mutually intelligible, but while Kinyarwanda has been studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to some extent, this work constitutes the first study on Kirundi. Along with the datasets, we provide statistics, guidelines for preprocessing, and monolingual and cross-lingual baseline models. Our experiments show that training embeddings on the relatively higher-resourced Kinyarwanda yields successful cross-lingual transfer to Kirundi. In addition, the design of the created datasets allows for a wider use in NLP beyond text classification in future studies, such as representation learning, cross-lingual learning with more distant languages, or as base for new annotations for tasks such as parsing, POS tagging, and NER. The datasets, stopwords, and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at https://github.com/Andrews2017/KINNEWS-and-KIRNEWS-Corpus .

Low-resource languages such as Sinhala are often overlooked by open-source Large Language Models (LLMs). In this research, we extend an existing multilingual LLM (Llama-3-8B) to better serve Sinhala. We enhance the LLM tokenizer with Sinhala specific vocabulary and perform continual pre-training on a cleaned 10 million Sinhala corpus, resulting in the SinLlama model. This is the very first decoder-based open-source LLM with explicit Sinhala support. When SinLlama was instruction fine-tuned for three text classification tasks, it outperformed base and instruct variants of Llama-3-8B by a significant margin.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, but their development has primarily focused on English and other high-resource languages, leaving many languages underserved. We present our latest Hindi-English bi-lingual LLM Mantra-14B with ~3\% average improvement in benchmark scores over both languages, outperforming models twice its size. Using a curated dataset composed of English and Hindi instruction data of 485K samples, we instruction tuned models such as Qwen-2.5-14B-Instruct and Phi-4 to improve performance over both English and Hindi. Our experiments encompassing seven different LLMs of varying parameter sizes and over 140 training attempts with varying English-Hindi training data ratios demonstrated that it is possible to significantly improve multilingual performance without compromising native performance. Further, our approach avoids resource-intensive techniques like vocabulary expansion or architectural modifications, thus keeping the model size small. Our results indicate that modest fine-tuning with culturally and locally informed data can bridge performance gaps without incurring significant computational overhead. We release our training code, datasets, and models under mit and apache licenses to aid further research towards under-represented and low-resource languages.

The scarcity of high-quality annotated data presents a significant challenge in developing effective end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST) systems, particularly for low-resource languages. This paper explores the hypothesis that weakly labeled data can be used to build ST models for low-resource language pairs. We constructed speech-to-text translation datasets with the help of bitext mining using state-of-the-art sentence encoders. We mined the multilingual Shrutilipi corpus to build Shrutilipi-anuvaad, a dataset comprising ST data for language pairs Bengali-Hindi, Malayalam-Hindi, Odia-Hindi, and Telugu-Hindi. We created multiple versions of training data with varying degrees of quality and quantity to investigate the effect of quality versus quantity of weakly labeled data on ST model performance. Results demonstrate that ST systems can be built using weakly labeled data, with performance comparable to massive multi-modal multilingual baselines such as SONAR and SeamlessM4T.

Improving multilingual language models capabilities in low-resource languages is generally difficult due to the scarcity of large-scale data in those languages. In this paper, we relax the reliance on texts in low-resource languages by using multilingual lexicons in pretraining to enhance multilingual capabilities. Specifically, we focus on zero-shot sentiment analysis tasks across 34 languages, including 6 high/medium-resource languages, 25 low-resource languages, and 3 code-switching datasets. We demonstrate that pretraining using multilingual lexicons, without using any sentence-level sentiment data, achieves superior zero-shot performance compared to models fine-tuned on English sentiment datasets, and large language models like GPT--3.5, BLOOMZ, and XGLM. These findings are observable for unseen low-resource languages to code-mixed scenarios involving high-resource languages.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in different fields, including standard Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. To elicit knowledge from LLMs, prompts play a key role, consisting of natural language instructions. Most open and closed source LLMs are trained on available labeled and unlabeled resources--digital content such as text, images, audio, and videos. Hence, these models have better knowledge for high-resourced languages but struggle with low-resourced languages. Since prompts play a crucial role in understanding their capabilities, the language used for prompts remains an important research question. Although there has been significant research in this area, it is still limited, and less has been explored for medium to low-resourced languages. In this study, we investigate different prompting strategies (native vs. non-native) on 11 different NLP tasks associated with 12 different Arabic datasets (9.7K data points). In total, we conducted 197 experiments involving 3 LLMs, 12 datasets, and 3 prompting strategies. Our findings suggest that, on average, the non-native prompt performs the best, followed by mixed and native prompts.

Instructing language models with user intent requires large instruction datasets, which are only available for a limited set of languages. In this paper, we explore alternatives to conventional instruction adaptation pipelines in low-resource scenarios. We assume a realistic scenario for low-resource languages, where only the following are available: corpora in the target language, existing open-weight multilingual base and instructed backbone LLMs, and synthetically generated instructions sampled from the instructed backbone. We present a comprehensive set of experiments for Basque that systematically study different combinations of these components evaluated on benchmarks and human preferences from 1,680 participants. Our conclusions show that target language corpora are essential, with synthetic instructions yielding robust models, and, most importantly, that using as backbone an instruction-tuned model outperforms using a base non-instructed model, and improved results when scaling up. Using Llama 3.1 instruct 70B as backbone our model comes near frontier models of much larger sizes for Basque, without using any Basque data apart from the 1.2B word corpora. We release code, models, instruction datasets, and human preferences to support full reproducibility in future research on low-resource language adaptation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), holds the potential to bridge language and information gaps, which can benefit the economies of developing nations. However, our analysis of FLORES-200, FLORES+, Ethnologue, and World Development Indicators data reveals that these benefits largely favor English speakers. Speakers of languages in low-income and lower-middle-income countries face higher costs when using OpenAI's GPT models via APIs because of how the system processes the input -- tokenization. Around 1.5 billion people, speaking languages primarily from lower-middle-income countries, could incur costs that are 4 to 6 times higher than those faced by English speakers. Disparities in LLM performance are significant, and tokenization in models priced per token amplifies inequalities in access, cost, and utility. Moreover, using the quality of translation tasks as a proxy measure, we show that LLMs perform poorly in low-resource languages, presenting a ``double jeopardy" of higher costs and poor performance for these users. We also discuss the direct impact of fragmentation in tokenizing low-resource languages on climate. This underscores the need for fairer algorithm development to benefit all linguistic groups.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA have shown incredible proficiency at natural language processing tasks and have even begun to excel at tasks across other modalities such as vision and audio. Despite their success, LLMs often struggle to perform well on low-resource languages because there is so little training data available. This shortcoming is especially prevalent with open source models. In this work, we explore training LLaMA-2 to speak Amharic, a language which is spoken by over 50 million people world wide, but has orders of magnitude less data available than languages like English. We employ methods previously used for training LLMs on other languages with data scarcity, and use open source translation models to perform data augmentation and grow our dataset from millions of tokens to billions. We further enhance the capabilities of our model by connecting an image encoder and training on a translated visual instruction tuning dataset in the same manner as LLaVA, resulting in a multimodal Amharic LLM that can understand images along with text. We introduce an Amharic version of a popular benchmarking dataset to evaluate our work. Our models and dataset are open sourced and available on GitHub.

For many (minority) languages, the resources needed to train large models are not available. We investigate the performance of zero-shot transfer learning with as little data as possible, and the influence of language similarity in this process. We retrain the lexical layers of four BERT-based models using data from two low-resource target language varieties, while the Transformer layers are independently fine-tuned on a POS-tagging task in the model's source language. By combining the new lexical layers and fine-tuned Transformer layers, we achieve high task performance for both target languages. With high language similarity, 10MB of data appears sufficient to achieve substantial monolingual transfer performance. Monolingual BERT-based models generally achieve higher downstream task performance after retraining the lexical layer than multilingual BERT, even when the target language is included in the multilingual model.

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) -- languages for which NLP re-search is particularly far behind in meeting user needs -- it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks -- tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text-only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text),supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models

Grammatical error correction (GEC) aims to improve quality and readability of texts through accurate correction of linguistic mistakes. Previous work has focused on high-resource languages, while low-resource languages lack robust tools. However, low-resource languages often face problems such as: non-standard orthography, limited annotated corpora, and diverse dialects, which slows down the development of GEC tools. We present a study on GEC for Zarma, spoken by over five million in West Africa. We compare three approaches: rule-based methods, machine translation (MT) models, and large language models (LLMs). We evaluated them using a dataset of more than 250,000 examples, including synthetic and human-annotated data. Our results showed that the MT-based approach using M2M100 outperforms others, with a detection rate of 95. 82% and a suggestion accuracy of 78. 90% in automatic evaluations (AE) and an average score of 3.0 out of 5.0 in manual evaluation (ME) from native speakers for grammar and logical corrections. The rule-based method was effective for spelling errors but failed on complex context-level errors. LLMs -- MT5-small -- showed moderate performance. Our work supports use of MT models to enhance GEC in low-resource settings, and we validated these results with Bambara, another West African language.

This paper investigates data selection and model merging methodologies aimed at incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities such as those of DeepSeek R1 into language-specific large language models (LLMs), with a particular focus on the Thai LLM. Our goal is to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs while maintaining their target language abilities. DeepSeek R1 excels in reasoning but primarily benefits high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. However, low-resource languages remain underserved due to the dominance of English-centric training data and model optimizations, which limit performance in these languages. This limitation results in unreliable code-switching and diminished effectiveness on tasks in low-resource languages. Meanwhile, local and regional LLM initiatives have attempted to bridge this gap by developing language-specific LLMs that focus on improving local linguistic fidelity. We demonstrate that, with only publicly available datasets and a computational budget of $120, it is possible to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs to match the level of DeepSeek R1, without compromising their performance on target language tasks.

Large multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have become the de facto state of the art for cross-lingual transfer in NLP. However, their large-scale deployment to many languages, besides pretraining data scarcity, is also hindered by the increase in vocabulary size and limitations in their parameter budget. In order to boost the capacity of mPLMs to deal with low-resource and unseen languages, we explore the potential of leveraging transliteration on a massive scale. In particular, we explore the UROMAN transliteration tool, which provides mappings from UTF-8 to Latin characters for all the writing systems, enabling inexpensive romanization for virtually any language. We first focus on establishing how UROMAN compares against other language-specific and manually curated transliterators for adapting multilingual PLMs. We then study and compare a plethora of data- and parameter-efficient strategies for adapting the mPLMs to romanized and non-romanized corpora of 14 diverse low-resource languages. Our results reveal that UROMAN-based transliteration can offer strong performance for many languages, with particular gains achieved in the most challenging setups: on languages with unseen scripts and with limited training data without any vocabulary augmentation. Further analyses reveal that an improved tokenizer based on romanized data can even outperform non-transliteration-based methods in the majority of languages.

A majority of language technologies are tailored for a small number of high-resource languages, while relatively many low-resource languages are neglected. One such group, Creole languages, have long been marginalized in academic study, though their speakers could benefit from machine translation (MT). These languages are predominantly used in much of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. We present the largest cumulative dataset to date for Creole language MT, including 14.5M unique Creole sentences with parallel translations -- 11.6M of which we release publicly, and the largest bitexts gathered to date for 41 languages -- the first ever for 21. In addition, we provide MT models supporting all 41 Creole languages in 172 translation directions. Given our diverse dataset, we produce a model for Creole language MT exposed to more genre diversity than ever before, which outperforms a genre-specific Creole MT model on its own benchmark for 26 of 34 translation directions.

With the advent of the Transformer architecture, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) results have shown great improvement lately. However, results in low-resource conditions still lag behind in both bilingual and multilingual setups, due to the limited amount of available monolingual and/or parallel data; hence, the need for methods addressing data scarcity in an efficient, and explainable way, is eminent. We propose an explainability-based training approach for NMT, applied in Unsupervised and Supervised model training, for translation of three languages of varying resources, French, Gujarati, Kazakh, to and from English. Our results show our method can be promising, particularly when training in low-resource conditions, outperforming simple training baselines; though the improvement is marginal, it sets the ground for further exploration of the approach and the parameters, and its extension to other languages.

This paper presents an overview of a program designed to address the growing need for developing freely available speech resources for under-represented languages. At present we have released 38 datasets for building text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition applications for languages and dialects of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. The paper describes the methodology used for developing such corpora and presents some of our findings that could benefit under-represented language communities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various tasks, yet significant disparities remain for non-English languages, and especially native African languages. This paper addresses these disparities by creating approximately 1 million human-translated words of new benchmark data in 8 low-resource African languages, covering a population of over 160 million speakers of: Amharic, Bambara, Igbo, Sepedi (Northern Sotho), Shona, Sesotho (Southern Sotho), Setswana, and Tsonga. Our benchmarks are translations of Winogrande and three sections of MMLU: college medicine, clinical knowledge, and virology. Using the translated benchmarks, we report previously unknown performance gaps between state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs in English and African languages. Finally, using results from over 400 fine-tuned models, we explore several methods to reduce the LLM performance gap, including high-quality dataset fine-tuning (using an LLM-as-an-Annotator), cross-lingual transfer, and cultural appropriateness adjustments. Key findings include average mono-lingual improvements of 5.6% with fine-tuning (with 5.4% average mono-lingual improvements when using high-quality data over low-quality data), 2.9% average gains from cross-lingual transfer, and a 3.0% out-of-the-box performance boost on culturally appropriate questions. The publicly available benchmarks, translations, and code from this study support further research and development aimed at creating more inclusive and effective language technologies.

Large language models (LLMs) can perform impressive feats with in-context learning or lightweight finetuning. It is natural to wonder how well these models adapt to genuinely new tasks, but how does one find tasks that are unseen in internet-scale training sets? We turn to a field that is explicitly motivated and bottlenecked by a scarcity of web data: low-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce MTOB (Machine Translation from One Book), a benchmark for learning to translate between English and Kalamang -- a language with less than 200 speakers and therefore virtually no presence on the web -- using several hundred pages of field linguistics reference materials. This task framing is novel in that it asks a model to learn a language from a single human-readable book of grammar explanations, rather than a large mined corpus of in-domain data, more akin to L2 learning than L1 acquisition. We demonstrate that baselines using current LLMs are promising but fall short of human performance, achieving 44.7 chrF on Kalamang to English translation and 45.8 chrF on English to Kalamang translation, compared to 51.6 and 57.0 chrF by a human who learned Kalamang from the same reference materials. We hope that MTOB will help measure LLM capabilities along a new dimension, and that the methods developed to solve it could help expand access to language technology for underserved communities by leveraging qualitatively different kinds of data than traditional machine translation.

Recently, ChatGPT has emerged as a powerful NLP tool that can carry out several tasks. However, the range of languages ChatGPT can handle remains largely a mystery. In this work, we investigate ChatGPT's language identification abilities. For this purpose, we compile Babel-670, a benchmark comprising 670 languages representing 23 language families. Languages in Babel-670 run the gamut between the very high-resource to the very low-resource and are spoken in five continents. We then study ChatGPT's (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) ability to (i) identify both language names and language codes (ii) under both zero- and few-shot conditions (iii) with and without provision of label set. When compared to smaller finetuned language identification tools, we find that ChatGPT lags behind. Our empirical analysis shows the reality that ChatGPT still resides in a state of potential enhancement before it can sufficiently serve diverse communities.

Massively multilingual language models such as multilingual BERT offer state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer performance on a range of NLP tasks. However, due to limited capacity and large differences in pretraining data sizes, there is a profound performance gap between resource-rich and resource-poor target languages. The ultimate challenge is dealing with under-resourced languages not covered at all by the models and written in scripts unseen during pretraining. In this work, we propose a series of novel data-efficient methods that enable quick and effective adaptation of pretrained multilingual models to such low-resource languages and unseen scripts. Relying on matrix factorization, our methods capitalize on the existing latent knowledge about multiple languages already available in the pretrained model's embedding matrix. Furthermore, we show that learning of the new dedicated embedding matrix in the target language can be improved by leveraging a small number of vocabulary items (i.e., the so-called lexically overlapping tokens) shared between mBERT's and target language vocabulary. Our adaptation techniques offer substantial performance gains for languages with unseen scripts. We also demonstrate that they can yield improvements for low-resource languages written in scripts covered by the pretrained model.

Multilingual language models have pushed state-of-the-art in cross-lingual NLP transfer. The majority of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, however, use one and the same massively multilingual transformer (e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to transfer to all target languages, irrespective of their typological, etymological, and phylogenetic relations to other languages. In particular, readily available data and models of resource-rich sibling languages are often ignored. In this work, we empirically show, in a case study for Faroese -- a low-resource language from a high-resource language family -- that by leveraging the phylogenetic information and departing from the 'one-size-fits-all' paradigm, one can improve cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. In particular, we leverage abundant resources of other Scandinavian languages (i.e., Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic) for the benefit of Faroese. Our evaluation results show that we can substantially improve the transfer performance to Faroese by exploiting data and models of closely-related high-resource languages. Further, we release a new web corpus of Faroese and Faroese datasets for named entity recognition (NER), semantic text similarity (STS), and new language models trained on all Scandinavian languages.

This study investigates the challenges of translating low-resource languages by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Various model configurations were tested on Hakka translations, with BLEU scores ranging from 12% (dictionary-only) to 31% (RAG with Gemini 2.0). The best-performing model (Model 4) combined retrieval and advanced language modeling, improving lexical coverage, particularly for specialized or culturally nuanced terms, and enhancing grammatical coherence. A two-stage method (Model 3) using dictionary outputs refined by Gemini 2.0 achieved a BLEU score of 26%, highlighting iterative correction's value and the challenges of domain-specific expressions. Static dictionary-based approaches struggled with context-sensitive content, demonstrating the limitations of relying solely on predefined resources. These results emphasize the need for curated resources, domain knowledge, and ethical collaboration with local communities, offering a framework that improves translation accuracy and fluency while supporting cultural preservation.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even when trained without parallel data. Yet, despite the fact that the amount of training data is gigantic, they still struggle with translating rare words, particularly for low-resource languages. Even worse, it is usually unrealistic to retrieve relevant demonstrations for in-context learning with low-resource languages on LLMs, which restricts the practical use of LLMs for translation -- how should we mitigate this problem? To this end, we present a novel method, CoD, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that augmenting ChatGPT with CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x ChrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We further demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot demonstration for low-resource languages.

Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools for working with natural language, bringing advances in many areas of computational linguistics. However, these models face challenges when applied to low-resource languages due to limited training data and difficulty in understanding cultural nuances. In this paper, we propose QueEn, a novel approach for Quechua-English translation that combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques. Our method leverages external linguistic resources through RAG and uses Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for efficient model adaptation. Experimental results show that our approach substantially exceeds baseline models, with a BLEU score of 17.6 compared to 1.5 for standard GPT models. The integration of RAG with fine-tuning allows our system to address the challenges of low-resource language translation while maintaining computational efficiency. This work contributes to the broader goal of preserving endangered languages through advanced language technologies.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with a population of more than 200 million people. More than 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria and it is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Despite this, natural language processing (NLP) research has mostly focused on the following four languages: Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian-Pidgin, and Yoruba (i.e <1% of the languages spoken in Nigeria). This is in part due to the unavailability of textual data in these languages to train and apply NLP algorithms. In this work, we introduce ibom -- a dataset for machine translation and topic classification in four Coastal Nigerian languages from the Akwa Ibom State region: Anaang, Efik, Ibibio, and Oro. These languages are not represented in Google Translate or in major benchmarks such as Flores-200 or SIB-200. We focus on extending Flores-200 benchmark to these languages, and further align the translated texts with topic labels based on SIB-200 classification dataset. Our evaluation shows that current LLMs perform poorly on machine translation for these languages in both zero-and-few shot settings. However, we find the few-shot samples to steadily improve topic classification with more shots.

Sentence representation from vanilla BERT models does not work well on sentence similarity tasks. Sentence-BERT models specifically trained on STS or NLI datasets are shown to provide state-of-the-art performance. However, building these models for low-resource languages is not straightforward due to the lack of these specialized datasets. This work focuses on two low-resource Indian languages, Hindi and Marathi. We train sentence-BERT models for these languages using synthetic NLI and STS datasets prepared using machine translation. We show that the strategy of NLI pre-training followed by STSb fine-tuning is effective in generating high-performance sentence-similarity models for Hindi and Marathi. The vanilla BERT models trained using this simple strategy outperform the multilingual LaBSE trained using a complex training strategy. These models are evaluated on downstream text classification and similarity tasks. We evaluate these models on real text classification datasets to show embeddings obtained from synthetic data training are generalizable to real datasets as well and thus represent an effective training strategy for low-resource languages. We also provide a comparative analysis of sentence embeddings from fast text models, multilingual BERT models (mBERT, IndicBERT, xlm-RoBERTa, MuRIL), multilingual sentence embedding models (LASER, LaBSE), and monolingual BERT models based on L3Cube-MahaBERT and HindBERT. We release L3Cube-MahaSBERT and HindSBERT, the state-of-the-art sentence-BERT models for Marathi and Hindi respectively. Our work also serves as a guide to building low-resource sentence embedding models.

Neural retrieval methods using transformer-based pre-trained language models have advanced multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval. However, their effectiveness for low-resource, morphologically rich languages such as Amharic remains underexplored due to data scarcity and suboptimal tokenization. We address this gap by introducing Amharic-specific dense retrieval models based on pre-trained Amharic BERT and RoBERTa backbones. Our proposed RoBERTa-Base-Amharic-Embed model (110M parameters) achieves a 17.6% relative improvement in MRR@10 and a 9.86% gain in Recall@10 over the strongest multilingual baseline, Arctic Embed 2.0 (568M parameters). More compact variants, such as RoBERTa-Medium-Amharic-Embed (42M), remain competitive while being over 13x smaller. Additionally, we train a ColBERT-based late interaction retrieval model that achieves the highest MRR@10 score (0.843) among all evaluated models. We benchmark our proposed models against both sparse and dense retrieval baselines to systematically assess retrieval effectiveness in Amharic. Our analysis highlights key challenges in low-resource settings and underscores the importance of language-specific adaptation. To foster future research in low-resource IR, we publicly release our dataset, codebase, and trained models at https://github.com/kidist-amde/amharic-ir-benchmarks.

Contextualized embeddings based on large language models (LLMs) are available for various languages, but their coverage is often limited for lower resourced languages. Training LLMs for such languages is often difficult due to insufficient data and high computational cost. Especially for very low resource languages, static word embeddings thus still offer a viable alternative. There is, however, a notable lack of comprehensive repositories with such embeddings for diverse languages. To address this, we present LowREm, a centralized repository of static embeddings for 87 low-resource languages. We also propose a novel method to enhance GloVe-based embeddings by integrating multilingual graph knowledge, utilizing another source of knowledge. We demonstrate the superior performance of our enhanced embeddings as compared to contextualized embeddings extracted from XLM-R on sentiment analysis. Our code and data are publicly available under https://huggingface.co/DFKI.

In this study, we tackle the challenge of limited labeled data for low-resource languages in ASR, focusing on Hindi. Specifically, we explore pseudo-labeling, by proposing a generic framework combining multiple ideas from existing works. Our framework integrates multiple base models for transcription and evaluators for assessing audio-transcript pairs, resulting in robust pseudo-labeling for low resource languages. We validate our approach with a new benchmark, IndicYT, comprising diverse YouTube audio files from multiple content categories. Our findings show that augmenting pseudo labeled data from YouTube with existing training data leads to significant performance improvements on IndicYT, without affecting performance on out-of-domain benchmarks, demonstrating the efficacy of pseudo-labeled data in enhancing ASR capabilities for low-resource languages. The benchmark, code and models developed as a part of this work will be made publicly available.

Large Language Models have significantly advanced natural language processing, achieving remarkable performance in tasks such as language generation, translation, and reasoning. However, their substantial computational requirements restrict deployment to high-end systems, limiting accessibility on consumer-grade devices. This challenge is especially pronounced for under-resourced languages like those spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, where relatively limited linguistic resources and benchmarks hinder effective evaluation. This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of compact state-of-the-art LLMs across several essential NLP tasks tailored for Iberian languages. The results reveal that while some models consistently excel in certain tasks, significant performance gaps remain, particularly for languages such as Basque. These findings highlight the need for further research on balancing model compactness with robust multilingual performance

TableQA is the task of answering questions over tables of structured information, returning individual cells or tables as output. TableQA research has focused primarily on high-resource languages, leaving medium- and low-resource languages with little progress due to scarcity of annotated data and neural models. We address this gap by introducing a fully automatic large-scale tableQA data generation process for low-resource languages with limited budget. We incorporate our data generation method on two Indic languages, Bengali and Hindi, which have no tableQA datasets or models. TableQA models trained on our large-scale datasets outperform state-of-the-art LLMs. We further study the trained models on different aspects, including mathematical reasoning capabilities and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our work is the first on low-resource tableQA focusing on scalable data generation and evaluation procedures. Our proposed data generation method can be applied to any low-resource language with a web presence. We release datasets, models, and code (https://github.com/kolk/Low-Resource-TableQA-Indic-languages).

Multilingual generation with large language models (LLMs) is often of poor quality for mid- to low-resource languages. Building on insights from interpretability, we demonstrate the existence of an implicit task-solving-->translation pipeline for generation, whereby the model first solves the required task in a largely target-language-agnostic manner, and subsequently translates answer concepts into the intended target language. We hypothesize that the failure of the translation stage is an important culprit for the observed low quality of final outputs, and formalize this as the translation barrier hypothesis. We test this hypothesis for a word translation task across 108 language pairs, using logit lens to observe model processing in intermediate layers. We find that a significant portion of overall failures indeed stems from translation failure, or the model's inability to translate correctly solved intermediate concepts into the target language. This is especially true for low-resource target languages. Our results highlight an important hurdle for end-to-end multilingual generation, and lend guiding insights for future work seeking to improve multilinguality in LLMs.

Large multilingual models have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) research. However, their high resource demands and potential biases from diverse data sources have raised concerns about their effectiveness across low-resource languages. In contrast, monolingual models, trained on a single language, may better capture the nuances of the target language, potentially providing more accurate results. This study benchmarks the cross-lingual transfer capabilities from a high-resource language to a low-resource language for both, monolingual and multilingual models, focusing on Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two Bantu languages. We evaluate the performance of transformer based architectures like Multilingual BERT (mBERT), AfriBERT, and BantuBERTa against neural-based architectures such as BiGRU, CNN, and char-CNN. The models were trained on Kinyarwanda and tested on Kirundi, with fine-tuning applied to assess the extent of performance improvement and catastrophic forgetting. AfriBERT achieved the highest cross-lingual accuracy of 88.3% after fine-tuning, while BiGRU emerged as the best-performing neural model with 83.3% accuracy. We also analyze the degree of forgetting in the original language post-fine-tuning. While monolingual models remain competitive, this study highlights that multilingual models offer strong cross-lingual transfer capabilities in resource limited settings.

To foster the neural encoding of Portuguese, this paper contributes foundation encoder models that represent an expansion of the still very scarce ecosystem of large language models specifically developed for this language that are fully open, in the sense that they are open source and openly distributed for free under an open license for any purpose, thus including research and commercial usages. Like most languages other than English, Portuguese is low-resourced in terms of these foundational language resources, there being the inaugural 900 million parameter Albertina and 335 million Bertimbau. Taking this couple of models as an inaugural set, we present the extension of the ecosystem of state-of-the-art open encoders for Portuguese with a larger, top performance-driven model with 1.5 billion parameters, and a smaller, efficiency-driven model with 100 million parameters. While achieving this primary goal, further results that are relevant for this ecosystem were obtained as well, namely new datasets for Portuguese based on the SuperGLUE benchmark, which we also distribute openly.

It has been shown that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) drops starkly in low-resource conditions, underperforming phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) and requiring large amounts of auxiliary data to achieve competitive results. In this paper, we re-assess the validity of these results, arguing that they are the result of lack of system adaptation to low-resource settings. We discuss some pitfalls to be aware of when training low-resource NMT systems, and recent techniques that have shown to be especially helpful in low-resource settings, resulting in a set of best practices for low-resource NMT. In our experiments on German--English with different amounts of IWSLT14 training data, we show that, without the use of any auxiliary monolingual or multilingual data, an optimized NMT system can outperform PBSMT with far less data than previously claimed. We also apply these techniques to a low-resource Korean-English dataset, surpassing previously reported results by 4 BLEU.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable performance in high-resource languages. However, their effectiveness diminishes significantly in the contexts of low-resource languages. Current multilingual enhancement methods are often limited to text modality or rely solely on machine translation. While such approaches help models acquire basic linguistic capabilities and produce "thin descriptions", they neglect the importance of multimodal informativeness and cultural groundedness, both of which are crucial for serving low-resource language users effectively. To bridge this gap, in this study, we identify two significant objectives for a truly effective MLLM in low-resource language settings, namely 1) linguistic capability and 2) cultural groundedness, placing special emphasis on cultural awareness. To achieve these dual objectives, we propose a dual-source strategy that guides the collection of data tailored to each goal, sourcing native web alt-text for culture and MLLM-generated captions for linguistics. As a concrete implementation, we introduce MELLA, a multimodal, multilingual dataset. Experiment results show that after fine-tuning on MELLA, there is a general performance improvement for the eight languages on various MLLM backbones, with models producing "thick descriptions". We verify that the performance gains are from both cultural knowledge enhancement and linguistic capability enhancement. Our dataset can be found at https://opendatalab.com/applyMultilingualCorpus.

Large language models (LLMs), with their powerful generative capabilities and vast knowledge, empower various tasks in everyday life. However, these abilities are primarily concentrated in high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages with weaker generative capabilities and relatively limited knowledge. Enhancing the multilingual capabilities of LLMs is therefore crucial for serving over 100 linguistic communities worldwide. An intuitive approach to enhance the multilingual capabilities would be to construct instruction data for various languages, but constructing instruction data for over 100 languages is prohibitively costly. In this paper, we introduce BayLing 2, which efficiently transfers generative capabilities and knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages through language alignment. To achieve this, we constructed a dataset of 3.2 million instructions, comprising high-resource language instructions (Chinese and English) and cross-lingual instructions for 100+ languages and performed instruction tuning based on the dataset to facilitate the capability transfer between languages. Using Llama as the foundation model, we developed BayLing-2-7B, BayLing-2-13B, and BayLing-2-8B, and conducted a comprehensive evaluation of BayLing. For multilingual translation across 100+ languages, BayLing shows superior performance compared to open-source models of similar scale. For multilingual knowledge and understanding benchmarks, BayLing achieves significant improvements across over 20 low-resource languages, demonstrating its capability of effective knowledge transfer from high-resource to low-resource languages. Furthermore, results on English benchmarks indicate that BayLing maintains high performance in highresource languages while enhancing the performance in low-resource languages. Demo, homepage, code and models of BayLing are available.