Papers by Sina Ahmadi
Dia-Lingle: A Gamified Interface for Dialectal Data Collection (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Dialects suffer from the scarcity of textual resources and are largely spoken rather than written. |
| Approach: | They propose a gamified interface that combines active learning with gamification to enhance the dialect corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed interface demonstrates high levels of user satisfaction while requiring minimal effort. |
Parity-Aware Byte-Pair Encoding: Improving Cross-lingual Fairness in Tokenization (2026.acl-long)
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Negar Foroutan, Clara Meister, Debjit Paul, Joel Niklaus, Sina Ahmadi, Antoine Bosselut, Rico Sennrich
| Challenge: | Tokenization is the first step of most NLP pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a parity-aware byte pair encoder that maximizes the compression gain of the currently worst-compressed language for cross-lingual parity. |
| Outcome: | a new algorithm reduces tokenization inequality by 89% compared to classical BPE . the proposed algorithm is based on a fair-max rule that maximizes the compression gain of the currently worst-compressed language . |
SwiLTra-Bench: The Swiss Legal Translation Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Joel Niklaus, Jakob Merane, Luka Nenadic, Sina Ahmadi, Yingqiang Gao, Cyrill A. H. Chevalley, Claude Humbel, Christophe Gösken, Lorenzo Tanzi, Thomas Lüthi, Stefan Palombo, Spencer Poff, Boling Yang, Nan Wu, Matthew Guillod, Robin Mamié, Daniel Brunner, Julio Pereyra, Niko Grupen
| Challenge: | In Switzerland legal translation relies on legal experts who must be both legal experts and skilled translators—creating bottlenecks and impacting effective access to justice. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmarking system that evaluates Swiss legal translation systems based on 180K aligned Swiss legal translator pairs . they show frontier models achieve superior translation performance across all document types while specialized translation systems excel specifically in laws but under-perform in headnotes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms specialized models in laws but underperform in headnotes. |
Cross-Lingual Link Discovery for Under-Resourced Languages (2022.lrec-1)
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Michael Rosner, Sina Ahmadi, Elena-Simona Apostol, Julia Bosque-Gil, Christian Chiarcos, Milan Dojchinovski, Katerina Gkirtzou, Jorge Gracia, Dagmar Gromann, Chaya Liebeskind, Giedrė Valūnaitė Oleškevičienė, Gilles Sérasset, Ciprian-Octavian Truică
| Challenge: | Linked data paradigms can be used to solve under-resourced languages' problem of under-utilization of resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for cross-lingual link discovery that can be applied to under-resourced languages . they argue that techniques for cross language linking can be readily applied . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technologies can be applied to under-resourced languages, the authors argue . the authors show that the Linked Data paradigm can be used to solve the problem . |
ConLoan: A Contrastive Multilingual Dataset for Evaluating Loanwords (2025.acl-long)
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Sina Ahmadi, Micha David Hess, Elena Álvarez-Mellado, Alessia Battisti, Cui Ding, Anne Göhring, Yingqiang Gao, Zifan Jiang, Andrianos Michail, Peshmerge Morad, Joel Niklaus, Maria Christina Panagiotopoulou, Stefano Perrella, Juri Opitz, Anastassia Shaitarova, Rico Sennrich
| Challenge: | Lexical borrowing is a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon influenced by geopolitical, societal, and technological factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel contrastive dataset comprising sentences with and without loanwords across 10 languages to examine how machine translation and language models process loanword . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that state-of-the-art models prefer loanwords over native terms and exhibit varying performance across languages. |
Language and Speech Technology for Central Kurdish Varieties (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study focused on the Kurdish language, a less-resourced Indo-European language spoken by over 30 million speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop resources for language and speech technology for Kurdish . they report the performance of machine translation, automatic speech recognition and language identification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on transcribing movies and TV series as an alternative to fieldwork. |
A Multilingual Evaluation Dataset for Monolingual Word Sense Alignment (2020.lrec-1)
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Sina Ahmadi, John Philip McCrae, Sanni Nimb, Fahad Khan, Monica Monachini, Bolette Pedersen, Thierry Declerck, Tanja Wissik, Andrea Bellandi, Irene Pisani, Thomas Troelsgård, Sussi Olsen, Simon Krek, Veronika Lipp, Tamás Váradi, László Simon, András Gyorffy, Carole Tiberius, Tanneke Schoonheim, Yifat Ben Moshe, Maya Rudich, Raya Abu Ahmad, Dorielle Lonke, Kira Kovalenko, Margit Langemets, Jelena Kallas, Oksana Dereza, Theodorus Fransen, David Cillessen, David Lindemann, Mikel Alonso, Ana Salgado, José Luis Sancho, Rafael-J. Ureña-Ruiz, Jordi Porta Zamorano, Kiril Simov, Petya Osenova, Zara Kancheva, Ivaylo Radev, Ranka Stanković, Andrej Perdih, Dejan Gabrovsek
| Challenge: | a new dataset aims to align monolingual dictionaries with a single sense level for 15 languages . this dataset covers a wide range of languages and resources . |
| Approach: | They propose to manually align monolingual dictionaries with possible semantic relationships . they use 15 languages to create a new baseline for the task of monolingual word sense alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers 15 languages and covers the more challenging task of linking general-purpose language. |
CODET: A Benchmark for Contrastive Dialectal Evaluation of Machine Translation (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation systems exhibit limited robustness in handling source-side linguistic variations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialectal benchmark to quantify the robustness of MT systems to handle source-side linguistic variations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that large MT models face challenges translating dialectal variants. |
PARME: Parallel Corpora for Low-Resourced Middle Eastern Languages (2025.acl-long)
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Sina Ahmadi, Rico Sennrich, Erfan Karami, Ako Marani, Parviz Fekrazad, Gholamreza Akbarzadeh Baghban, Hanah Hadi, Semko Heidari, Mahîr Dogan, Pedram Asadi, Dashne Bashir, Mohammad Amin Ghodrati, Kourosh Amini, Zeynab Ashourinezhad, Mana Baladi, Farshid Ezzati, Alireza Ghasemifar, Daryoush Hosseinpour, Behrooz Abbaszadeh, Amin Hassanpour, Bahaddin Jalal Hamaamin, Saya Kamal Hama, Ardeshir Mousavi, Sarko Nazir Hussein, Isar Nejadgholi, Mehmet Ölmez, Horam Osmanpour, Rashid Roshan Ramezani, Aryan Sediq Aziz, Ali Salehi, Mohammadreza Yadegari, Kewyar Yadegari, Sedighe Zamani Roodsari
| Challenge: | UNESCO has identified 60 varieties of Middle Eastern languages as underrepresented . a limited availability of language technology perpetuates a cycle of digital exclusion . |
| Approach: | They develop a parallel corpora for eight severely under-resourced varieties in the region . they evaluate machine translation capabilities through zero-shot approaches and fine-tuning experiments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model aims to improve the processing of the eight under-resourced languages in the Middle East. |
Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | linguistically under-represented communities have an extraordinary opportunity to create content in their native languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to solve the problem of script normalization for languages written in a Perso-Arabic script and use a transformer-based model to analyze the noise levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can normalize a language written in a Perso-Arabic script and improve machine translation and language identification tasks. |
CoFiF Plus: A French Financial Narrative Summarisation Corpus (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing corpora for financial narrative summarisation exists in English but there is a significant lack of financial text resources in the French language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use natural language processing to analyse financial documents to find the best summarisation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first to provide a comprehensive set of financial text written in French. |
Defying Wikidata: Validation of Terminological Relations in the Web of Data (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | a new approach to validate terminological data retrieved from open encyclopaedic knowledge bases is needed . the legal domain is one of the most valuable areas of knowledge in the world . |
| Approach: | They propose to validate terminological data retrieved from open encyclopaedic knowledge bases by enriching them with information from existing resources in the Semantic Web. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method validates terms from open encyclopaedic knowledge bases in four languages. |