As an Indo-Aryan language with limited available data, Chakma remains largely underrepresented in language models. In this work, we introduce a novel corpus of contextually coherent Bangla-transliterated Chakma, curated from Chakma literature, and validated by native speakers. Using this dataset, we fine-tune six encoder-based transformer models, including multilingual (mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, DistilBERT), regional (BanglaBERT, IndicBERT), and monolingual English (DeBERTaV3) variants on masked language modeling (MLM) tasks. Our experiments show that fine-tuned multilingual models outperform their pre-trained counterparts when adapted to Bangla-transliterated Chakma, achieving up to 73.54% token accuracy and a perplexity as low as 2.90. Our analysis further highlights the impact of data quality on model performance and shows the limitations of OCR pipelines for morphologically rich Indic scripts. Our research demonstrates that Bangla-transliterated Chakma can be very effective for transfer learning for Chakma language, and we release our dataset to encourage further research on multilingual language modeling for low-resource languages.

Often, multilingual language models are trained with the objective to map semantically similar content (in different languages) in the same latent space. In this paper, we show a nuance in this training objective, and find that by changing the language of the input query, we can improve the question answering ability of language models. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce the term Language Specific Knowledge (LSK) to denote queries that are best answered in an "expert language" for a given LLM, thereby enhancing its question-answering ability. We introduce the problem of language selection -- for some queries, language models can perform better when queried in languages other than English, sometimes even better in low-resource languages -- and the goal is to select the optimal language for the query. Second, we introduce simple to strong baselines to test this problem. Additionally, as a first-pass solution to this novel problem, we design LSKExtractor to benchmark the language-specific knowledge present in a language model and then exploit it during inference. To test our framework, we employ three datasets that contain knowledge about both cultural and social behavioral norms. Overall, LSKExtractor achieves up to 10% relative improvement across datasets, and is competitive against strong baselines, while being feasible in real-world settings. Broadly, our research contributes to the open-source development (https://github.com/agarwalishika/LSKExtractor/tree/main) of language models that are inclusive and more aligned with the cultural and linguistic contexts in which they are deployed.

In July, EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) announced their joint initiative to build a large language model (LLM) . Now, this model is available and serves as a building block for developers and organisations for future applications such as chatbots, translation systems, or educational tools. The model is named Apertus - Latin for "open" - highlighting its distinctive feature: the entire development process, including its architecture, model weights, and training data and recipes, is openly accessible and fully documented. AI researchers, professionals, and experienced enthusiasts can either access the model through the strategic partner Swisscom or download it from Hugging Face - a platform for AI models and applications - and deploy it for their own projects. Apertus is freely available in two sizes - featuring 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, the smaller model being more appropriate for individual usage.

Cutting-edge LLMs have emerged as powerful tools for multilingual communication and understanding. However, LLMs perform worse in Common Sense Reasoning (CSR) tasks when prompted in low-resource languages (LRLs) like Hindi or Swahili compared to high-resource languages (HRLs) like English. Equalizing this inconsistent access to quality LLM outputs is crucial to ensure fairness for speakers of LRLs and across diverse linguistic communities. In this paper, we propose an approach to bridge this gap in LLM performance. Our approach involves fine-tuning an LLM on synthetic code-switched text generated using controlled language-mixing methods. We empirically demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on synthetic code-switched datasets leads to substantial improvements in LRL model performance while preserving or enhancing performance in HRLs. Additionally, we present a new dataset of synthetic code-switched text derived from the CommonSenseQA dataset, featuring three distinct language ratio configurations.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive translation capabilities even without being explicitly trained on parallel data. This remarkable property has led some to believe that parallel data is no longer necessary for building multilingual language models. While some attribute this to the emergent abilities of LLMs due to scale, recent work suggests that it is actually caused by incidental bilingual signals present in the training data. Various methods have been proposed to maximize the utility of parallel data to enhance the multilingual capabilities of multilingual encoder-based and encoder-decoder language models. However, some decoder-based LLMs opt to ignore parallel data instead. In this work, we conduct a systematic study on the impact of adding parallel data on LLMs' multilingual capabilities, focusing specifically on translation and multilingual common-sense reasoning. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that parallel data can significantly improve LLMs' multilingual capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) showcase increasingly impressive English benchmark scores, however their performance profiles remain inconsistent across multilingual settings. To address this gap, we introduce PolyPrompt, a novel, parameter-efficient framework for enhancing the multilingual capabilities of LLMs. Our method learns a set of trigger tokens for each language through a gradient-based search, identifying the input query's language and selecting the corresponding trigger tokens which are prepended to the prompt during inference. We perform experiments on two ~1 billion parameter models, with evaluations on the global MMLU benchmark across fifteen typologically and resource diverse languages, demonstrating accuracy gains of 3.7%-19.9% compared to naive and translation-pipeline baselines.

Multilingual language models (MLLMs) are crucial for handling text across various languages, yet they often show performance disparities due to differences in resource availability and linguistic characteristics. While the impact of pre-train data percentage and model size on performance is well-known, our study reveals additional critical factors that significantly influence MLLM effectiveness. Analyzing a wide range of features, including geographical, linguistic, and resource-related aspects, we focus on the SIB-200 dataset for classification and the Flores-200 dataset for machine translation, using regression models and SHAP values across 204 languages. Our findings identify token similarity and country similarity as pivotal factors, alongside pre-train data and model size, in enhancing model performance. Token similarity facilitates cross-lingual transfer, while country similarity highlights the importance of shared cultural and linguistic contexts. These insights offer valuable guidance for developing more equitable and effective multilingual language models, particularly for underrepresented languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multilingual capabilities, yet challenges persist in adapting these models for low-resource languages. In this study, we investigate the effects of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) on multilingual Gemma models for Marathi, a language with limited resources. Using a translated Alpaca dataset with 52,000 instruction-response pairs, our findings reveal that while evaluation metrics often show a performance decline post-fine-tuning, manual assessments frequently suggest that the fine-tuned models outperform their original counterparts. The observations indicate improvements in target language generation capabilities but a reduction in reasoning abilities following language adaptation. These results underscore the need for improved evaluation methodologies and the creation of high-quality native datasets to accurately assess language-specific model performance in low-resource settings.

Large-scale deployment of large language models (LLMs) in various applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, requires LLMs to be culturally sensitive to the user to ensure inclusivity. Culture has been widely studied in psychology and anthropology, and there has been a recent surge in research on making LLMs more culturally inclusive in LLMs that goes beyond multilinguality and builds on findings from psychology and anthropology. In this paper, we survey efforts towards incorporating cultural awareness into text-based and multimodal LLMs. We start by defining cultural awareness in LLMs, taking the definitions of culture from anthropology and psychology as a point of departure. We then examine methodologies adopted for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion in downstream tasks, and methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness in LLMs. Further, we discuss the ethical implications of cultural alignment, the role of Human-Computer Interaction in driving cultural inclusion in LLMs, and the role of cultural alignment in driving social science research. We finally provide pointers to future research based on our findings about gaps in the literature.

Morphology is a crucial factor for multilingual language modeling as it poses direct challenges for tokenization. Here, we seek to understand how tokenization influences the morphological knowledge encoded in multilingual language models. Specifically, we capture the impact of tokenization by contrasting two multilingual language models: mT5 and ByT5. The two models share the same architecture, training objective, and training data and only differ in their tokenization strategies: subword tokenization vs.\@ character-level tokenization. Probing the morphological knowledge encoded in these models on four tasks and 17 languages, our analyses show that the models learn the morphological systems of some languages better than others and that morphological information is encoded in the middle and late layers. Finally, we show that languages with more irregularities benefit more from having a higher share of the pre-training data.