Guest Talks in Fall Semester 2026
15 September 2026: Mark Fišel
Modelling Extremely Low-resource Finno-Ugric Languages and Dialects
I will describe an on-going effort on developing NLP tools for the Finno-Ugric family, the members of which range from languages with 1M+ speakers and "an army and fleet" to critically endangered dialects and languages with few resources and even fewer speakers. The latest development direction in this work is on multi-tasking models and general-purpose LMs, which is, however, hindered by the availability of data, low domain coverage, diverse quality in data from different sources and variety in orthography. I will present the already developed models and performed experiments, and will be happy to discuss open questions.
Text Technology/Digital Linguistics Colloquium HS 2026 | Institut für Computerlinguistik | UZH
16 September 2026: Paola Escudero
Explaining multilingual perception with a revised L2LP model
Online talk
Phonetics Lunch Meeting | Institut für Computerlinguistik | UZH
29 September 2026: Tanja Samardžić
Controlled token allocation in optimising multilingual vocabularies
Multilingual (pre-)training of large language models is necessary but it is prone to various biases due to the uneven data availability and structural differences between languages. This problem becomes apparent already at the level of tokenisation: if no care is taken, a multilingual vocabulary (constructed by means of BPE) ends up dominated by items representing high-resource languages. To prevent this, various controlling techniques have been proposed, from upsampling tokens from low-resource languages to minimising token sharing across languages and setting cross-lingual parity as one of the BPE's objectives. In this talk, I will present experiments testing potential advantages of several new techniques aimed at designing better multilingual vocabularies. Our preliminary findings suggest that controlled token allocation is more beneficial with larger vocabularies allowing systematic improvements in model-intrinsic metrics (bits-per-byte, information parity) and also in some downstream tasks (belebele).
Text Technology/Digital Linguistics Colloquium HS 2026 | Institut für Computerlinguistik | UZH