Language-specific neurons, units in LLMs that strongly correlate with individual languages have been shown to influence model behavior by deactivating them. However, their role in amplification remains underexplored.This work investigates the effect of amplifying language-specific neurons through interventions across 18 languages, including low-resource ones, using three models primarily trained in different languages. We compare amplification factors by their effectiveness in steering to the target language using a proposed Language Steering Shift (LSS) evaluation score, then evaluate it on downstream tasks: commonsense reasoning (XCOPA, XWinograd), knowledge (Include), and translation (FLORES). The optimal amplification steering factors effectively steer output toward nearly all tested languages. Intervention using this factor on downstream tasks improves self-language performance in some cases but generally degrades cross-language results. These findings highlight the effect of language-specific neurons in multilingual behavior, where amplification can be beneficial especially for low-resource languages, but provides limited advantage for cross-lingual transfer.

Pruning techniques have been studied to construct small models for efficiency, yet the effect of cross-lingual, which shows language performance transferability, is understudied in this field. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual effects in multilingual large language model compression using iterative pruning and recovery. We employ structured layer pruning with LoRA-based recovery and knowledge distillation, testing whether calibration languages different from target evaluation languages can preserve multilingual performance. Experiments on Qwen2.5-7B and Llama3.1-8B demonstrate that any recovery language consistently outperforms no-recovery baselines, with even low-resource languages like Swahili providing ~5% improvements. In contrast to expectations, dominant pretraining languages do not always yield the best results, where Indonesian achieves the highest performance in Llama3.1-8B, while Japanese performs the best in Qwen2.5-7B. Our findings reveal that cross-lingual calibration effectively maintains multilingual capabilities in the iterative pruning.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with culture-specific knowledge, particularly in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. To evaluate their understanding of such knowledge, we introduce WorldCuisines, a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural, visually grounded language understanding. This benchmark includes a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects, spanning 9 language families and featuring over 1 million data points, making it the largest multicultural VQA benchmark to date. It includes tasks for identifying dish names and their origins. We provide evaluation datasets in two sizes (12k and 60k instances) alongside a training dataset (1 million instances). Our findings show that while VLMs perform better with correct location context, they struggle with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. To support future research, we release a knowledge base with annotated food entries and images along with the VQA data.

This paper describes our team’s submission for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2021 shared task. We participated in three subtasks: Classifying adverse drug effect, COVID-19 self-report, and COVID-19 symptoms. Our system is based on BERT model pre-trained on the domain-specific text. In addition, we perform data cleaning and augmentation, as well as hyperparameter optimization and model ensemble to further boost the BERT performance. We achieved the first rank in both classifying adverse drug effects and COVID-19 self-report tasks.

Ambiguity is a problem we frequently face in Natural Language Processing. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a task to determine the correct sense of an ambiguous word. However, research in WSD for Indonesian is still rare to find. The availability of English-Indonesian parallel corpora and WordNet for both languages can be used as training data for WSD by applying Cross-Lingual WSD method. This training data is used as an input to build a model using supervised machine learning algorithms. Our research also examines the use of Word Embedding features to build the WSD model.