Papers with LRLs
FAD-X: Fusing Adapters for Cross-lingual Transfer to Low-Resource Languages (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Adapter-based tuning is a technique that selectively updates language-specific parameters to adapt to a new language, rather than fine-tuning all shared weights. |
| Approach: | They propose to add light-weight adapters to multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) and add language-specific parameters to adapt to a new language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter can enhance cross-lingual transfer from pretrained adapters for well-known named entity recognition and classification benchmarks. |
Overlap-based Vocabulary Generation Improves Cross-lingual Transfer Among Related Languages (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained multilingual models have shown great potential for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to low web-resource languages (LRLs). |
| Approach: | They propose a vocabulary generation algorithm which enhances lexical overlap across related languages by generating a token that increases the representation of LRLs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves cross-lingual transfer accuracy without reducing HRL representation and accuracy. |
Small Models, Big Impact: Efficient Corpus and Graph-Based Adaptation of Small Multilingual Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (2025.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource languages (LRLs) face significant challenges in natural language processing due to limited data. |
| Approach: | They evaluate adapter-based methods for adapting mLMs to low-resource languages . they use unstructured text and structured knowledge from ConceptNet to evaluate adapters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform large language models and LLaMA-3 and deepSeek-R1 models on low training data. |
Meta-XNLG: A Meta-Learning Approach Based on Language Clustering for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn shareable structures from low-resource languages are limited in the zero-shot setting. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework to learn shareable structures from typologically diverse languages based on meta- learning and language clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to learn shareable structures from typologically diverse languages with limited annotated data. |
Efficient Continual Pre-training of LLMs for Low-resource Languages (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Open-source large language models (LLMs) are a promising tool for low-resource languages . however, there is still a substantial performance gap between high-resourced languages and LRLs . |
| Approach: | They develop an algorithm to select a subset of texts from a larger corpus and use it to select tokens for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces the cost of continual pre-training (CPT) with large amounts of language-specific data. |
On the effective transfer of knowledge from English to Hindi Wikipedia (2025.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that in low-resource languages, Wikipedia articles on the same topic differ significantly due to cultural relevance and the varied expertise of contributors. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework to enhance knowledge equity between English and Hindi Wikipedia sections by extracting relevant information from external resources readily available. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances Hindi Wikipedia articles by 65% and 62% based on automatic and human judgment-based evaluations. |
Predicting Machine Translation Performance on Low-Resource Languages: The Role of Domain Similarity (2024.findings-eacl)
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Eric Khiu, Hasti Toossi, Jinyu Liu, Jiaxu Li, David Anugraha, Juan Flores, Leandro Roman, A. Seza Doğruöz, En-Shiun Lee
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for predicting the performance of NLP models for low-resource languages (LRLs) focus on high-resourced languages, overlooking LRLs and domain shifts. |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of domain similarity on predicting performance of machine translation models in low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The results show that domain similarity has the most important impact on predicting the performance of Machine Translation models. |
Rapid Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation to New Languages (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt neural machine translation systems to low-resource languages are difficult to implement and require large amounts of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train neural machine translation systems to new low-resource languages . they propose to start with massively multilingual "seed models" and continue training on data related to the LRL . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves BLEU scores of up to 15.5 with no data from the LRL and improves over other adaptation methods by 1.7 BLUE points average over 4 LRL settings. |
Exploiting Language Relatedness for Low Web-Resource Language Model Adaptation: An Indic Languages Study (2021.acl-long)
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Yash Khemchandani, Sarvesh Mehtani, Vaidehi Patil, Abhijeet Awasthi, Partha Talukdar, Sunita Sarawagi
| Challenge: | Recent research in multilingual language models (LMs) has demonstrated their ability to effectively handle multiple languages in a single model. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit relatedness among languages in a language family to overcome corpora limitations of LRLs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exploits relatedness among languages in a language family to overcome corpora limitations for low web-resource languages. |
Efficient Low-Resource Language Adaptation via Multi-Source Dynamic Logit Fusion (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Proxy Tuning offers a logit-level strategy for introducing scaling effects, but it often fails in LRL settings because the large model’s weak LRL competence might overwhelm the knowledge of specialized smaller models. |
| Approach: | They propose a logit-based framework that balances LRL competence from a continually pretrained small model, task competence from high-resource language instruction tuning, and the scaling benefits of large models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across four model families and eight LRLs show that TriMix outperforms single-model baselines and Proxy Tuning. |
Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual machine translation models face an imbalance problem due to the different learning competencies of different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Machine Translation, named CCL-M, to help schedule the high resource languages and low resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a steady and significant performance gain compared to the previous state-of-the-art approach on the TED talks dataset. |
Breaking Down Multilingual Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual training is an essential ingredient in machine translation systems . but it has different effects in different multilingual settings, such as many-to-one, one-tomany and many- to-many learning . |
| Approach: | They compare multilingual training settings with encoders and decoders initialized by multilingual learning . they find important attention heads for each language pair and compare their correlations during inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the best models for high-resource languages and one-to-many models for low-resourced languages. |
Neural Factor Graph Models for Cross-lingual Morphological Tagging (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to morphological tagging are limited by the assumption that tag sets overlap . a limited amount of data is available for most languages to learn these morphology taggers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for cross-lingual morphological tagging that relaxes this assumption . they use factorial conditional random fields with neural network potentials to smooth over superficial differences in the surface forms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can smooth over superficial differences in the surface forms and generate unseen or rare tag sets. |
ZmBART: An Unsupervised Cross-lingual Transfer Framework for Language Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in NLP focus on large annotated training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework that does not use parallel or pseudo-parallel/back-translated data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework does not use parallel or pseudo-parallel/back-translated data. |
MERLIN: Multi-Stage Curriculum Alignment for Multilingual Encoder-LLM Integration in Cross-Lingual Reasoning (2026.eacl-long)
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Kosei Uemura, David Guzmán, Quang Phuoc Nguyen, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, En-Shiun Annie Lee, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
| Challenge: | Existing methods to align large language models with multilingual encoders raise accuracy for low-resource languages (LRLs) but performance of LLMs in low- and high-resourced languages remains a problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-stacking framework that iteratively refines in 2-stages based on a curriculum strategy and adapts only a small set of DoRA weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves exact-match accuracy by +12.9 pp over MindMerger and outperforms GPT-4o-mini by 15.2 pp on the AfriMGSM benchmark. |
Improving Target-side Lexical Transfer in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual data is more beneficial for NMT models that translate from the LRL to a target language than those that translate into the LLLs. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoder that embeds character n-grams into NMT models that translate from an LRL to a target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed decoder improves the performance of NMT models that translate from an LRL to a target language. |
Blessing of Multilinguality: A Systematic Analysis of Multilingual In-Context Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a widely adopted technique for learning large language models . however, there is little systematic understanding of when and why it works well . |
| Approach: | They analyze multilingual in-context learning using demonstrations in HRLs to enhance cross-lingual transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms English-only models on high-resource languages . the study shows that the presence of irrelevant non-English sentences in the prompt yields measurable gains . |
Pretraining Language Models Using Translationese (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that large language models perform well in low-resource languages . a vast majority of languages don't have comparable data as compared to English . |
| Approach: | They propose to use Translationese as synthetic data for pre-training language models for low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces performance of LMs trained on clean data in Indian languages . the proposed model performs better in English than in other languages, but is not comparable to English. |
Disentangling Pretrained Representation to Leverage Low-Resource Languages in Multilingual Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual neural machine translation requires an enormous dataset, leaving the low-resource language (LRL) underdeveloped. |
| Approach: | They evaluated five languages using a parallel corpus of 1,000 instances each and found a zero-shot improvement of 7.4 from the baseline score of 7.1 to a score of 15.5 at best. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance in the linguistically diverse country of Indonesia by 7.4 from baseline score of 7.1 to 15.5 at best. |
Cross-Lingual Retrieval Augmented Prompt for Low-Resource Languages (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual pretrained language models (MPLMs) perform strongly in cross-lingual transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment context with similar sentences retrieved from a high-resource language (HRL) they find a significant correlation between cross-lingual transfer performance and similarity between high- and low-resourced languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms finetuning by 3.7% on three downstream tasks with multilingual parallel test sets across 10 LRLs covering 6 language families in unlabeled and labeled settings. |
POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource languages (LRLs) face challenges in supervised neural machine translation due to limited parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a dynamic graph to organize auxiliary languages in prompts to improve LRL translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation accuracy in low-resource languages (LRLs) using auxiliary language pairs and synthetic pseudo-parallel data. |
Enhancing Taiwanese Hokkien Dual Translation by Exploring and Standardizing of Four Writing Systems (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, machine translation systems cater to high-resource languages (HRLs), while low-resourced languages (LRLs) like Taiwanese Hokkien are relatively under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained LLaMA 2-7B model specialized in Traditional Mandarin Chinese to leverage orthographic similarities between Taiwanese Hokkien Han and Traditional Mandarin China. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between Taiwanese Hokkien and other low-resource languages by using a pre-trained LLaMA 2-7B model and a monolingual corpus. |
Entropy-guided Vocabulary Augmentation of Multilingual Language Models for Low-resource Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual language models (MLLMs) support low-resource languages (LRLs) but LRL words are under-represented in wordpiece/subword vocabularies, leading to low task accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-based vocabulary augmented language model to detect LRL words with undesirable wordpiece segmentations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance and limits on wordpiece augmentation strategies for multiple diverse LRLs. |
Machine Translation Hallucination Detection for Low and High Resource Languages using Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Kenza Benkirane, Laura Gongas, Shahar Pelles, Naomi Fuchs, Joshua Darmon, Pontus Stenetorp, David Adelani, Eduardo Sánchez
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations in machine translation are limited for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They evaluate sentence-level hallucination detection approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) they find that the choice of model is essential for performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the existing models in HRLs and LRLs on average by 0.16 MCC. |
MiLiC-Eval: Benchmarking Multilingual LLMs for China’s Minority Languages (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in high-resource languages but struggle with low-resourced languages . minority languages such as Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian are marginalized in NLP research due to limited digital representation and the scarcity of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for minority languages in China that tracks the progress of large language models on low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark focuses on underrepresented writing systems and syntax-intensive tasks. |
Cross-Lingual Knowledge Projection and Knowledge Enhancement for Zero-Shot Question Answering in Low-Resource Languages (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge bases (KBs) in low-resource languages are often incomplete, restricting the ability to do zero-shot question answering using multilingual language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel cross-lingual mapping technique which improves word alignments extracted from parallel English-LRL text by combining lexical alignment, named entity recognition, and semantic alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot question answering accuracy by up to 17% compared to baselines without KB access. |
SSP: Self-Supervised Prompting for Cross-Lingual Transfer to Low-Resource Languages using Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that very large language models (LLMs) can perform NLP tasks with just in-context learning (ICL) but their utility in other languages is underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to in-context learning that uses noisy test data to generate more accurate labels for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three tasks and eleven LLMs show that the proposed approach outperforms existing in-context learning baselines on English NLP and reasoning tasks. |
Cost-Performance Optimization for Processing Low-Resource Language Tasks Using Commercial LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive zero/few-shot inference and generation quality for high-resource languages (HRLs). |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce the cost of processing LRLs by code-mixing, translation, and transliteration of LRL to HRLs to ensure that predictive and generative qualities are not compromised. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the cost of processing LRLs while ensuring that predictive and generative qualities are not compromised. |
Optimizing Language Augmentation for Multilingual Large Language Models: A Case Study on Korean (2024.lrec-main)
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ChangSu Choi, Yongbin Jeong, Seoyoon Park, Inho Won, HyeonSeok Lim, SangMin Kim, Yejee Kang, Chanhyuk Yoon, Jaewan Park, Yiseul Lee, HyeJin Lee, Younggyun Hahm, Hansaem Kim, KyungTae Lim
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) use pretraining to predict the subsequent word, but less-resourced languages are being overlooked. |
| Approach: | They propose to expand the MLLM vocabularies to enhance expressiveness and use bilingual data for pretraining to align the high- and less-resourced languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in qualitative analyses compared to Korean monolingual models. |
TopXGen: Topic-Diverse Parallel Data Generation for Low-Resource Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning and similarity search have been shown to improve LLMs' performance in machine translation, but they lag behind when dealing with low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses an LLM to generate topic-specific target-side data in the LRL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach boosts LLM translation performance during in-context learning and fine-tuning. |
When Your Cousin Has the Right Connections: Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction for Related Data-Imbalanced Languages (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction depend on good quality static or contextual embeddings for both languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction between a related LRL and a high-resource language that only requires inference on a masked language model of the HRL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on low-resource languages with 5M tokens against Hindi . it is compared with existing methods on (mid-resourced) Marathi and Nepali . |