We have kicked off proceedings with some brief opening remarks from @catherinearnett.bsky.social

🚨 EvalEval is back - now in San Diego!🚨 🧠 Join us for the 2025 Workshop on "Evaluating AI in Practice Bridging Statistical Rigor, Sociotechnical Insights, and Ethical Boundaries" (Co-hosted with UKAISI) 📅 Dec 8, 2025 📝 Abstract due: Nov 20, 2025 Details below! ⬇️ evalevalai.com/events/works...

I’m so excited that Global PIQA is out! This has been a herculean effort by our 300+ contributors. The result is an extremely high-quality, culturally-specific benchmark for over 100 languages.

Our #NeurIPS2025 paper shows that even comparable monolingual tokenizers have different compression rates across languages. But by getting rid of whitespace tokenization and using a custom vocab size for each language, we can reduce token premiums. Preprint out now!

WMDQS is underway! Come join us in Room 520A at @colmweb.org! #COLM2025

In collaboration with @commoncrawl.bsky.social, MLCommons, and @eleutherai.bsky.social, the first edition of WMDQS at @colmweb.org starts tomorrow in Room 520A! We have an updated schedule on our website, including a list of all accepted papers.

I’m in Montreal this week for @colmweb.org and @wmdqs.bsky.social! Looking forward to chatting about tokenizers, multilingual data, and more! #COLM2025

I have a new blog post about the so-called “tokenizer-free” approach to language modeling and why it’s not tokenizer-free at all. I also talk about why people hate tokenizers so much!

Did you know? ❌77% of language models on @hf.co are not tagged for any language 📈For 95% of languages, most models are multilingual 🚨88% of models with tags are trained on English In a new blog post, @tylerachang.bsky.social and I dig into these trends and why they matter! 👇

We are in need of some emergency reviewers for MRL. If you are available, please fill out this form!

We extended the deadline by one day, so you have until the end of today (Aug 24) AoE to submit! Good luck!

We have over 200 volunteers now for 90+ languages! We are hoping to expand the diversity of our language coverage and are still looking for participants who speak these languages. Check out how to get involved below, and please help us spread the word!

With six weeks left before the deadline, we have had over 50 volunteers sign up to contribute for over 30 languages. If you don’t see your language represented on the map, this is your sign to get involved!

I’m in Vienna all week for @aclmeeting.bsky.social and I’ll be presenting this paper on Wednesday at 11am (Poster Session 4 in HALL X4 X5)! Reach out if you want to chat about multilingual NLP, tokenizers, and open models!

If you want to help us improve language and cultural coverage, and build an open source LangID system, please register to our shared task on Language Identification! 💬 Registering is easy! All the details are on the shared task webpage: wmdqs.org/shared-task/ Deadline: July 23, 2025 (AoE) ⏰

Really grateful to the organizers for the recognition of our work!

I'll be at ICML next week for the Tokenization Workshop @tokshop.bsky.social presenting two papers: "Evaluating Morphological Alignment of Tokenizers in 70 Languages" and "BPE Stays on SCRIPT: Structured Encoding for Robust Multilingual Pretokenization". Check out the paper threads below!

MorphScore got an update! MorphScore now covers 70 languages 🌎🌍🌏 We have a new-preprint out and we will be presenting our paper at the Tokenization Workshop @tokshop.bsky.social at ICML next week! @marisahudspeth.bsky.social @brenocon.bsky.social

Just a few days left to contribute annotations before the first release of training data. We have over 17,000 document annotations so far!

Stop by our discover server tomorrow, Friday June 27th, to hear about @catherinearnett.bsky.social's work!

I'm really excited about this shared task! We hope to create a massively multilingual physical reasoning dataset in collaboration with researchers around the world 🌍

The call for papers is out for the 5th edition of the Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning which will take place in Suzhou, China co-located with EMNLP 2025! See details below!

The deadline for paper submissions has been extended! The new deadline is July 3, 2025. AoE. For more information, please visit: wmdqs.org

One of the biggest obstacles to improving language technologies for low-resource languages is the lack of data. To address this, we need better language identification tools. So, we're organizing a shared task on Language Identification for Web Data! #NLP #NLProc

Call for papers! We are organising the 1st Workshop on Multilingual Data Quality Signals with @mlcommons.org and @eleutherai.bsky.social, held in tandem with @colmweb.org. Submit your research on multilingual data quality! Submission deadline is 23 June, more info: wmdqs.org

@tylerachang.bsky.social and I are giving a talk later today at the Cambridge NLP group about the curse of multilinguality and training small models. The talk is open to the public and the link is below!

My paper with @tylerachang.bsky.social and @jamichaelov.bsky.social will appear at #ACL2025NLP! The updated preprint is available on arxiv. I look forward to chatting about bilingual models in Vienna!

What if we didn't use UTF-8 as a starting point for tokenization? In UTF-8, different scripts need different number of bytes. And tokenizers can create merges that lead to stranded bytes and undecodable sequences. Sander Land and I propose a novel encoding strategy that solves those problems!

If you are into tokenization and have some bandwidth this week, we need more reviewers!

📣 Call for Paper Alert: TokShop @ ICML 2025 TokShop explores tokenization across all data modalities. Topics include: subword NLP techniques, multimodal approaches, multilingual challenges, post-training modification, alternative representations, and statistical perspectives.

I’m in Paris this week to present about best practices for multilingual LLM evaluation in the open! I’m talking at PyTorch Day as part of #GOSIMParis2025. I also wrote up the content of my talk as a blog post if you’re interested - link below!

I’m in Paris this week to present about best practices for multilingual LLM evaluation in the open! I’m talking at PyTorch Day as part of #GOSIMParis2025. I also wrote up the content of my talk as a blog post if you’re interested - link below!

I'm super excited to be starting this week at @eleutherai.bsky.social as an NLP Researcher! I will be continuing my work on all things multilingual 🌎

✨New pre-print✨ Crosslingual transfer allows models to leverage their representations for one language to improve performance on another language. We characterize the acquisition of shared representations in order to better understand how and when crosslingual transfer happens.

Announcing the release of Common Corpus 2. The largest fully open corpus for pretraining comes back better than ever: 2 trillion tokens with document-level licensing, provenance and language information. huggingface.co/datasets/Ple...

Today we are launching a server dedicated to Tokenization research! Come join us! discord.gg/CDJhnSvU

I’m in Paris for the week. First I’ll be presenting at @iaseai.bsky.social and then I’ll be around for the AI Action Summit. Feel free to get in touch if you’re around and want to chat!

#COLING2025 isn't over yet! I'm presenting my poster now on GatherTown! Come stop by and chat!

Super honored that this paper received the best paper award at #COLING2025!

This week I came back to San Diego and successfully defended my dissertation, “A Linguistic Approach to Crosslingual and Multilingual NLP”!

This work will be presented (remotely) at #COLING2025, which starts next week!

Our first ever models trained on open data are featured in the main French business newspapers @lesechosfr.bsky.social "Pleias models comply with EU norms on copyright and data protection. They are especially destined by public administrations." www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats...

Really interesting new paper! I recommend checking out the interactive demo - I was very surprised by which examples were most driving model responses pair-code.github.io/pretraining-...

I'm so excited about this project to improve open language identification tools. If you speak a language other than English, I encourage you to participate! dynabench.org/tasks/text-l...

I've been thinking about small models and why people don't like them substack.com/@catherinear... #NLP

💫New open models from Pleias💫 available now on @hf.co tinyurl.com/pleias-models #NLP

This is so cool! Glad our classifier can be of use in different contexts!

✨New pre-print!✨ Successful language technologies should work for a wide variety of languages. But some languages have systematically worse performance than others. In this paper we ask whether performance differences are due to morphological typology. Spoiler: I don’t think so! #NLP #linguistics

Trying to put together a list of multilingual* NLP people. If you want to be added, let me know! bsky.app/profile/did:... *Also, what do we call this intersection of multilingual and crosslingual research? I hate it when people say multilingual NLP to mean NLP for a non-English language.

I wrote up some thoughts from #EMNLP2024, about some of the cool papers I saw and some interesting conversations. Also, this is my first substack post! open.substack.com/pub/catherin...