Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers exploring the expanding capabilities of multilingual and cross-lingual technologies. The featured works highlight advancements in leveraging multilingual embeddings, adapting vision-language models to new languages, and enhancing language models with inclusive and knowledge-based approaches.

MultiScript30k: Leveraging Multilingual Embeddings to Extend Cross Script Parallel Data

Multi30k is frequently cited in the multimodal machine translation (MMT) literature, offering parallel text data for training and fine-tuning deep learning models. However, it is limited to four languages: Czech, English, French, and German. This restriction has led many researchers to focus their investigations only on these languages. As a result, MMT research on diverse languages has been stalled because the official Multi30k dataset only represents European languages in Latin scripts. Previous efforts to extend Multi30k exist, but the list of supported languages, represented language families, and scripts is still very short. To address these issues, we propose MultiScript30k, a new Multi30k dataset extension for global languages in various scripts, created by translating the English version of Multi30k (Multi30k-En) using NLLB200-3.3B. The dataset consists of over (30000) sentences and provides translations of all sentences in Multi30k-En into Ar, Es, Uk, Zh_Hans and Zh_Hant. Similarity analysis shows that Multi30k extension consistently achieves greater than (0.8) cosine similarity and symmetric KL divergence less than (0.000251) for all languages supported except Zh_Hant which is comparable to the previous Multi30k extensions ArEnMulti30k and Multi30k-Uk. COMETKiwi scores reveal mixed assessments of MultiScript30k as a translation of Multi30k-En in comparison to the related work. ArEnMulti30k scores nearly equal MultiScript30k-Ar, but Multi30k-Uk scores $6.4\%$ greater than MultiScript30k-Uk per split.

Multilingual VLM Training: Adapting an English-Trained VLM to French

Artificial intelligence has made great progress in recent years, particularly in the development of Vision--Language Models (VLMs) that understand both visual and textual data. However, these advancements remain largely limited to English, reducing their accessibility for non--English speakers. It is essential to extend these capabilities to a broader range of languages. This paper explores the challenges of adapting an English-trained VLM to different languages. To this end, we will explore and compare different methods for their performance and computational cost. We consider a translation-based pipeline, LoRA finetuning, and a two-stage finetuning strategy that separates vision adaptation from language adaptation. To evaluate these methods, we use a combination of standard multimodal benchmarks translated into the target language and manual assessments by native experts. The results reveal that dataset translation remains a major bottleneck in multilingual VLM performance, with data quality limiting the effectiveness of training and evaluation. These findings suggest that future efforts should focus on native-language dataset collection and improved translation strategies.

Enhancing Next-Generation Language Models with Knowledge Graphs: Extending Claude, Mistral IA, and GPT-4 via KG-BERT

Large language models (LLMs) like Claude, Mistral IA, and GPT-4 excel in NLP but lack structured knowledge, leading to factual inconsistencies. We address this by integrating Knowledge Graphs (KGs) via KG-BERT to enhance grounding and reasoning. Experiments show significant gains in knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering and entity linking. This approach improves factual reliability and enables more context-aware next-generation LLMs.

Applying NLP to iMessages: Understanding Topic Avoidance, Responsiveness, and Sentiment

What is your messaging data used for? While many users do not often think about the information companies can gather based off of their messaging platform of choice, it is nonetheless important to consider as society increasingly relies on short-form electronic communication. While most companies keep their data closely guarded, inaccessible to users or potential hackers, Apple has opened a door to their walled-garden ecosystem, providing iMessage users on Mac with one file storing all their messages and attached metadata. With knowledge of this locally stored file, the question now becomes: What can our data do for us? In the creation of our iMessage text message analyzer, we set out to answer five main research questions focusing on topic modeling, response times, reluctance scoring, and sentiment analysis. This paper uses our exploratory data to show how these questions can be answered using our analyzer and its potential in future studies on iMessage data.

XDoGE: Multilingual Data Reweighting to Enhance Language Inclusivity in LLMs

Current large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive amounts of text data, primarily from a few dominant languages. Studies suggest that this over-reliance on high-resource languages, such as English, hampers LLM performance in mid- and low-resource languages. To mitigate this problem, we propose to (i) optimize the language distribution by training a small proxy model within a domain-reweighing DoGE algorithm that we extend to XDoGE for a multilingual setup, and (ii) rescale the data and train a full-size model with the established language weights either from scratch or within a continual pre-training phase (CPT). We target six languages possessing a variety of geographic and intra- and inter-language-family relations, namely, English and Spanish (high-resource), Portuguese and Catalan (mid-resource), Galician and Basque (low-resource). We experiment with Salamandra-2b, which is a promising model for these languages. We investigate the effects of substantial data repetition on minor languages and under-sampling on dominant languages using the IberoBench framework for quantitative evaluation. Finally, we release a new promising IberianLLM-7B-Instruct model centering on Iberian languages and English that we pretrained from scratch and further improved using CPT with the XDoGE weights.