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Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families

1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

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abstract

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.

fields

cs.IR 1

years

2025 1

verdicts

CONDITIONAL 1

representative citing papers

Teaching a Language Model to Speak the Language of Tools

cs.IR · 2025-06-29 · conditional · novelty 5.0

LoRA fine-tuning of BgGPT models on a bilingual Bulgarian function-calling dataset yields large gains on a self-built 120-case benchmark while keeping knowledge benchmarks stable.

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  • Teaching a Language Model to Speak the Language of Tools cs.IR · 2025-06-29 · conditional · none · ref 25 · internal anchor

    LoRA fine-tuning of BgGPT models on a bilingual Bulgarian function-calling dataset yields large gains on a self-built 120-case benchmark while keeping knowledge benchmarks stable.