Morocco

In this work, we introduce Sudanese-Flores, an extension of the popular Flores+ machine translation (MT) benchmark to the Sudanese Arabic dialect. We translate both the DEV and DEVTEST splits of the Modern Standard Arabic dataset into the corresponding Sudanese dialect, resulting in a total of 2,009 sentences. While the dialect was recently introduced in Google Translate, there are no available benchmark in this dialect despite spoken by over 40 million people. Our evaluation on two leading LLMs such as GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Flash showed that while the performance English to Arabic is impressive (more than 23 BLEU), they struggle on Sudanese dialect (less than 11 BLEU) in zero-shot settings. In few-shot scenario, we achieved only a slight boost in performance.

EACL 2026

Sudanese-Flores: Extending FLORES+ to Sudanese Arabic Dialect

sudanese arabic

machine translation (mt)

low-resource languages

multilingual nlp

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

workshop paper

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems perform well for high-resource languages, but most African languages, including Wolof, remain underrepresented, particularly in maternal and reproductive healthcare. This work proposes a domain-specific approach to improving Wolof ASR under low-resource conditions, addressing limited annotated data, orthographic variability, and code-switching. We curated a dataset of 750 validated Wolof utterances covering 250 maternal health keywords and applied data augmentation to increase acoustic diversity. Pretrained models, including wav2vec~2.0 and Whisper, were benchmarked to select candidates for fine-tuning. Using parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a Whisper model was adapted to the maternal health domain. Evaluation using Word Error Rate (WER), Character Error Rate (CER), and Keyword Error Rate (KER), which measures medically critical term transcription accuracy, shows substantial gains, reducing WER from 46.5% to 23.2\% and KER from 17\% to 11%. Community-based evaluation on 1,340 real-world utterances reveals a moderate degradation, with WER increasing by 35%. These results demonstrate that lightweight domain adaptation with small, high-quality data can significantly improve ASR for low-resource healthcare applications.This work introduces one of the first Wolof ASR datasets for healthcare and presents a practical framework for developing reliable speech recognition tools in underrepresented languages, improving access to healthcare information and services.

Enhancing Automatic Speech Recognition Models for Maternal and Reproductive Health: Fine-Tuning and Real-World Evaluation in Wolof

Wikipedia editors undertake the task of editing machine translation (MT) outputs in various languages to disseminate multilingual knowledge from English. But are editors doing more than just translating or fixing MT output? To answer this broad question, we constructed a dataset of 4,335 fine-grained annotated parallel pairs of MT translations and human post-edit (HE) translations for five low-resource African languages: Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, Yoruba, and Zulu. We report on our data selection and annotation methodologies as well as findings from the annotated dataset, the most surprising of which is that annotators mostly preferred the MT translations over their HE counterparts for three out of five languages. We analyze the nature of these "fluency breaking" edits and provide recommendations for the MT post-editing workflows in the Wikipedia domain and beyond.

Evaluating Native-Speaker Preferences on Machine Translation and Post-Edits for Five African Languages

Effective text generation and chat interfaces for low-resource languages (LRLs) remain a challenge for state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to support. This is mainly due to the difficulty of curating high-quality instruction datasets for LRLs, a limitation prevalent in the languages spoken across the African continent and other regions. Current approaches, such as automated translation and synthetic data generation, frequently yield outputs that lack fluency or even orthographic consistency. In this paper, we introduce InstructLR, a novel framework designed to generate high-quality instruction datasets for LRLs. Our approach integrates LLM-driven text generation with a dual-layer quality filtering mechanism: an automated filtering layer based on retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG)-based n-shot prompting, and a human-in-the-loop validation layer. Drawing inspiration from benchmarks such as MMLU in task definition, InstructLR has facilitated the creation of three multi-domain instruction benchmarks: **ZarmaInstruct-50k**, **BambaraInstruct-50k**, and **FulfuldeInstruct-50k**.

InstructLR: A Scalable Approach to Create Instruction Dataset for Under-Resourced Languages

African languages have very little labelled data, and it is unclear if augmenting the quantity of annotation data reliably enhances downstream performance. The study is a systematic sample-size scaling study of natural language inference (NLI) on 16 African languages based on the AfriXNLI benchmark. Under controlled conditions, two multilingual transformer models with roughly 0.6B parameters XLM-R Large fine-tuned on XNLI and AfroXLM-R Large are tested on sample sizes of between 50 and 500 labeled examples and average their results across random subsampling runs. As opposed to the usual belief of monotonic increase with increased data, we find a strongly language-sensitive and often non-monotonic scaling behavior. Some languages show early saturation or decrease in performance with sample size as well as high variance in low resource regimes. These results indicate that the volume of data is not enough to guarantee stable profits to African NLI, creating the necessity of language-sensitive datasets creation and stronger multi-lingual modelling strategies.

Sample-Size Scaling of the African Languages NLI Evaluation

Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) is a valuable tool in machine translation and cross-lingual transfer learning, but it remains challenging for agglutinative and low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate the use of weighted sub-word embeddings in BLI for agglutinative languages. We further evaluate a graph-matching and Procrustes-based BLI approach on two Bantu languages, assessing its effectiveness in a previously underexplored language family. Our results for Swahili with an average P@1 score of $51.84$% for a $3000$ word dictionary demonstrate the success of the approach for Bantu languages. Weighted sub-word embeddings perform competitively on Swahili and outperform word embeddings in our experiments with Zulu.

Using Subword-Embeddings for Bilingual Lexicon Induction in Bantu Languages

Tonogenesis—the historical process by which segmental contrasts evolve into lexical tone—has traditionally been studied through comparative reconstruction and acoustic phonetics. We introduce a computational approach that quantifies the functional role of pitch at different stages of this sound change by measuring how pitch manipulation affects automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. Through analysis on the sensitivity to pitch-flattening from a set of closely related Tibetan languages, we find evidence of a tonogenesis continuum: atonal Amdo dialects tolerate pitch removal the most, while fully tonal Ü-Tsang varieties show severe degradation, and intermediate Kham dialects fall measurably between these extremes. These gradient effects demonstrate how ASR models implicitly learn the shifting functional load of pitch as languages transition from consonant-based to tone-based lexical contrasts. Our findings show that computational methods can capture fine-grained stages of sound change and suggest that traditional functional load metrics, based solely on minimal pairs, may overestimate pitch dependence in transitional systems where segmental and suprasegmental cues remain phonetically intertwined.

The Tonogenesis Continuum in Tibetan: A Computational Investigation

Small language models (SLMs) offer computationally efficient alternatives to large language models, yet their translation quality for low-resource languages (LRLs) remains severely limited. This work presents the first large-scale evaluation of SLMs across 200 languages, revealing systematic underperformance in LRLs and identifying key sources of linguistic disparity. We show that knowledge distillation from strong teacher models using predominantly monolingual LRL data substantially boosts SLM translation quality—often enabling 2B–3B models to match or surpass systems up to 70B parameters. Our study highlights three core findings: (1) a comprehensive benchmark exposing the limitations of SLMs on 200 languages; (2) evidence that LRL-focused distillation improves translation without inducing catastrophic forgetting, with full-parameter fine-tuning and decoder-only teachers outperforming LoRA and encoder–decoder approaches; and (3) consistent cross-lingual gains demonstrating the scalability and robustness of the method. These results establish an effective, low-cost pathway for improving LRL translation and provide practical guidance for deploying SLMs in truly low-resource settings.

Are Small Language Models the Silver Bullet to Low-Resource Languages Machine Translation?

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance degrades significantly in ultra-low resource settings, particularly for endangeredlanguages like Tao (Yami) which lack extensive parallel corpora. This study investigates strategies to bootstrap a Tao-Tagalog translation system using the NLLB-200 (600 million parameter) model under extremely limited supervision. We propose a multi-faceted approach combining domain-specific fine-tuning, synthetic data augmentation, and cross-lingual transfer learning. Specifically, we leverage the phylogenetic proximity of Ivatan, a related Batanic language, to pre-train the model, and utilize dictionary-based generation to construct synthetic conversational data. Our results demonstrate that transfer learning from Ivatan improves translation quality on in-domain religious texts, achieving a BLEU score of 34.85. Conversely, incorporating synthetic data enhances the model’s ability to generalize to conversational contexts, mitigating the domain bias often inherent in religious corpora. These findings highlight the effectiveness of exploiting linguistic typology and structured lexical resources to develop functional NMT systems for under-represented Austronesian languages.

Tao–Filipino Neural Machine Translation: Strategies for Ultra–Low-Resource Settings

In this paper, we propose a text filter designed to support multiple languages. The method simply aggregates vocabulary from a monolingual corpus and compares it against the input. Despite its simplicity, the approach proves highly effective in removing code-mixed text.When combined with existing language identification techniques, our method can enhance the purity of the corpus in the target language. Consequently, applying it to parallel corpora for machine translation has the potential to improve translation quality.Additionally, the proposed method supports the incremental addition of new languages without the need to retrain those already learned. This feature easily enables our method to be applied to low-resource languages.

Text Filter Based on Automatically Acquired Vocabularies for Multilingual Machine Translation

We present a comprehensive evaluation and extension of the LLM-Assisted Rule-Based Machine Translation (LLM-RBMT) paradigm, an approach that combines the strengths of rule-based methods and Large Language Models (LLMs) to support translation in no-resource settings. We present a robust new implementation (the Pipeline Translator) that generalizes the LLM-RBMT approach and enables flexible adaptation to novel constructions. We benchmark it against four alternatives (Builder, Instructions, RAG, and Fine-tuned translators) on a curated dataset of 150 English sentences, and compare them across translation quality and runtime. The Pipeline Translator consistently achieves the best overall performance. The LLM-RBMT methods (Pipeline and Builder) also offer an important advantage: they naturally align with evaluation strategies that prioritize grammaticality and semantic fidelity over surface-form overlap, which is critical for endangered languages where mistranslation carries high risk.

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Next from EACL 2026

Enhancing Automatic Speech Recognition Models for Maternal and Reproductive Health: Fine-Tuning and Real-World Evaluation in Wolof

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