Birger Moell

Author directory

2026

Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synthetic parallel corpus with approximately 4.8 trillion target-language tokens across 36 European languages, produced by translating 100 billion high-quality Nemotron-CC tokens with Tower+ and OPUS-MT/HPLT-MT systems. For many medium- and lower-resource European languages, this is the largest openly available pre-training resource. On a broad multilingual benchmark suite, reference LLMs trained on MultiSynt/MT reach the final score of HPLT 2.0, a native-data baseline, using roughly 72% fewer pre-training tokens, and outperform it by approximately 15% relative at a matched 100B-token training budget. Our analyses also identify evaluation blind spots: standard multiple-choice benchmarks miss translation-quality differences that a fluency-sensitive LLM-as-judge evaluation cleanly recovers on the trained LLMs (with no fluency deficit in MultiSynt itself), and Norwegian idiomatic and culturally grounded tasks remain better served by native data. We release the corpus, including row-aligned translations from multiple systems, to support controlled research on multilingual pre-training data and evaluation.

2022

As part of the PSST challenge, we explore how data augmentations, data sources, and model size affect phoneme transcription accuracy on speech produced by individuals with aphasia. We evaluate model performance in terms of feature error rate (FER) and phoneme error rate (PER). We find that data augmentations techniques, such as pitch shift, improve model performance. Additionally, increasing the size of the model decreases FER and PER. Our experiments also show that adding manually-transcribed speech from non-aphasic speakers (TIMIT) improves performance when Room Impulse Response is used to augment the data. The best performing model combines aphasic and non-aphasic data and has a 21.0% PER and a 9.2% FER, a relative improvement of 9.8% compared to the baseline model on the primary outcome measurement. We show that data augmentation, larger model size, and additional non-aphasic data sources can be helpful in improving automatic phoneme recognition models for people with aphasia.