Papers for

multilingual ai engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Arabic language benchmarks improve textual entailment and inference tests

E-CONAN (Entailment, CONtradition And Neutral) Benchmarks: Arabic Textual Entailment and Natural Inference Datasets

Abstract: Natural Language Inference processes pairs of sentences to extract their semantic relations. NLI has been a hot research topic, integrated as a main component in other NLP applications. Despite significant advancements in textual inference across various languages all around the world, Arabic language still suffers from limited resources in this domain. To address this gap, this paper introduces E-CONAN benchmarks that are composed of sentences pairs from various sources: (1) automatically-translated pairs, (2) human-validated machine-translated pairs, (3) hand-crafted pairs from teaching Arabic as foreign language books, and (4) headlines pairs from different news channels containing rumors. E-CONAN contains two benchmark datasets, E-CONAN-2, a 2-way dataset (RTE) and E-CONAN-3, a 3-way dataset (NLI). Additionally, we have used E-CONAN benchmarks to evaluate 9 state-of-the-art multilingual pretrained models using zero-shot classification. Models were evaluated across the ArNLI, XNLI, and E-CONAN datasets. Results show that E-CONAN is a potentially valuable resource for evaluating model generalization and even for fine-tuning pre-trained models. Its diverse composition, derived from a combination of sources, offers a broader and more robust assessment compared to XNLI and ArNLI. In addition, we have evaluated 5 LLMs on E-CONAN-3 dataset. Moreover, we incorporated MARBERT as a representative Arabic-specific baseline and conducted performance evaluation comparison to demonstrate how Arabic-specific models scale against cross-lingual and LLM-based approaches on the E-CONAN benchmarks. Furthermore, we conducted detailed qualitative and quantitative error analysis to analyze frequent error patterns. E-CONAN benchmarks will be publicly available, we hope that it will enrich research community in Arabic textual entailment and natural language inference.

Thu 10 SeptComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Understanding how sentences relate in meaning is important for language technology, but Arabic lacks good test data for this. The authors created new Arabic datasets from multiple sources to better check if models understand when one sentence entails, contradicts, or is neutral to another. They tested several large language models and found their datasets help reveal strengths and weaknesses. These datasets will be shared publicly to support further research in Arabic language understanding.
Open 2609.11334v1

Llms show only slight errors when input data seems unlikely

Do LLMs Make More Mistakes If They Do Not Believe the Input Data?

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinating or misinterpreting facts, which impairs their usability in retrieval-augmented generation or data-to-text systems. We analyse how faithfulness of LLMs to provided context depends on how plausible they perceive the context to be (context-memory conflict). To better identify error patterns, we make use of the increased difficulty of non-English and low-resource language text generation and input data based on local knowledge, only partially captured in models' parametric knowledge. We let the models generate text in English, Czech, Slovak and Upper Sorbian from factual (FA), counterfactual (CFA) and fictional (FI) RDF triples containing local Czech and Slovak data. Contrary to our expectations, we observe only a weak context-memory conflict on the human-annotated sample. For Kimi K3 as an LLM judge, which agrees well with human annotations on the sample, counterfactual inputs receive only slightly lower faithfulness scores than factual ones (-0.05 on a 1-5 scale). We also find that a suboptimal choice of LLM judge would lead to overestimating the strength of the context-memory conflict.

Tue 8 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) sometimes make mistakes when they process information that seems unlikely or fictional. The authors studied how well LLMs stick to facts when given true, made-up, or fictional data in different languages, focusing on data about local Czech and Slovak facts. They found that these models only slightly reduce their accuracy when handling unlikely inputs, meaning they mostly trust the context they are given. They also found that using a less suitable method to evaluate these mistakes can make the errors seem worse than they are.
Open 2609.09363v1