Expanding the Lexicon of Ge'ez Based African Languages: A Comparative Study of Amharic and Tigrinya
Multilingual pre-trained language models such as XLM-R perform well for major languages but struggle with low-resource Ge'ez-script languages, largely because Latin-script-centric tokenizers split their words into many subwords. We introduce VEXMLM, a vocabulary-extended variant of XLM-R targeting Amharic and Tigrinya. We train language-specific SentencePiece tokenizers on monolingual corpora, extend XLM-R's vocabulary with 30k Ge'ez-script subwords, and initialize each new embedding to the mean of the pretrained embeddings. VEXMLM undergoes two-stage training: (1) continued masked language modeling on the monolingual corpora and (2) supervised fine-tuning on question answering and named ...
| Authors | Hailay Kidu Teklehaymanot, Debela Desalegn Yadeta, Wolfgang Nejdl |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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