Santiago Martínez Novoa
Author directoryAlso published as: Santiago Martinez Novoa
2026
Online Language Adaptive Sampling for Better Distributed Cross-lingual Gains
Quang Phuoc Nguyen | Félix Gaschi | David Anugraha | Santiago Martínez Novoa | En-Shiun Annie Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Quang Phuoc Nguyen | Félix Gaschi | David Anugraha | Santiago Martínez Novoa | En-Shiun Annie Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Realignment is a promising approach for improving the cross-lingual transfer ability of multilingual language models, particularly for extremely low-resource languages (LRLs). However, existing realignment methods rely on uniform and random sampling of parallel sentences across languages, which may be suboptimal under limited batch sizes. In practice, models may benefit from seeing certain languages more frequently, especially those that are poorly aligned, and the optimal distribution can evolve throughout training. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive sampling strategy that assigns trainable sampling probabilities to each language. Languages that contribute more to the realignment loss are sampled more frequently in subsequent batches, and the optimal distribution can evolve throughout training. Our method employs an inner–outer optimization loop with a small overhead, leading to consistent performance improvements and, more importantly, distributing the gains across languages. We observed a +0.67 average performance increase on all tasks with XLM-R, and +0.60 with Gemma 2 9B compared with uniform realignment. Furthermore, our method is robust across different models.
MeSHClass-ES and AnatEM-ES: Open Resources for Spanish Biomedical NLP
Santiago Martinez Novoa | Lina Gomez Mesa | Juan Prieto | Ruben Manrique
BioNLP 2026
Santiago Martinez Novoa | Lina Gomez Mesa | Juan Prieto | Ruben Manrique
BioNLP 2026
Despite Spanish being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, biomedical NLP resources and systematic evaluations remain limited relative to English. We address this gap by constructing and releasing two Spanish biomedical corpora: (1) MeSHClass-ES, a 29,063 abstract bilingual corpus translated from PubMed with Opus-MT, and (2) AnatEM-ES, the AnatEM anatomical entity corpus translated with a chunk-level LLM-based pipeline that jointly preserves BIO annotations across 13,849 entity mentions. Both corpora achieve a mean COMET score of 0.73 despite using different translation systems. We benchmark nine encoder models spanning general-domain Spanish, domain-specific, and multilingual architectures for both tasks. RigoBERTa-2.0 leads both tasks (micro-F1 classification 0.69, tied with SciBETO-large; NER F1 0.66). Both domain pretraining and model capacity drive performance, with the gap slightly more pronounced for NER (4-point spread) than classification (3-point spread). XLM-RoBERTa-large emerges as a competitive multilingual baseline. A parallel evaluation of four open-weight decoders (7?9B) reveals a task-dependent encoder-decoder gap: QLoRA-adapted Gemma-2-9B reaches 88% of the best encoder on classification (micro-F1 .61 vs .69), but for NER every decoder configuration we tested stays at or below 40% of the best encoder F1. We release both corpora on the HuggingFace Hub1, translation pipelines, and evaluation code on GitHub.