Krister Kruusmaa

Aleksei Dorkin, Taido Purason, Emil Kalbaliyev et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly trained on English-centric data, resulting in uneven performance for smaller languages. We study whether continued pretraining (CPT) can substantially improve Estonian capabilities in a pretrained multilingual LLM while preserving its English and general reasoning performance. Using Llama 3.1 8B as the main base model, we perform CPT on a mixture that increases Estonian exposure while approximating the original training distribution through English replay and the inclusion of code, mathematics, and instruction-like data. We subsequently apply supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and chat vector merging to introduce robust instruction-following behavior. Evaluation on a comprehensive suite of Estonian benchmarks shows consistent gains in linguistic competence, knowledge, reasoning, translation quality, and instruction-following compared to the original base model and its instruction-tuned variant, while maintaining competitive performance on English benchmarks. These findings indicate that CPT, with an appropriately balanced data mixture, together with post-training alignment, can substantially improve single-language capabilities in pretrained multilingual LLMs.

Andres Karjus, Kais Allkivi, Silvia Maine et al.

Large language models (LLMs) enable rapid and consistent automated evaluation of open-ended exam responses, including dimensions of content and argumentation that have traditionally required human judgment. This is particularly important in cases where a large amount of exams need to be graded in a limited time frame, such as nation-wide graduation exams in various countries. Here, we examine the applicability of automated scoring on two large datasets of trial exam essays of two full national cohorts from Estonia. We operationalize the official curriculum-based rubric and compare LLM and statistical natural language processing (NLP) based assessments with human panel scores. The results show that automated scoring can achieve performance comparable to that of human raters and tends to fall within the human scoring range. We also evaluate bias, prompt injection risks, and LLMs as essay writers. These findings demonstrate that a principled, rubric-driven, human-in-the-loop scoring pipeline is viable for high-stakes writing assessment, particularly relevant for digitally advanced societies like Estonia, which is about to adapt a fully electronic examination system. Furthermore, the system produces fine-grained subscore profiles that can be used to generate systematic, personalized feedback for instruction and exam preparation. The study provides evidence that LLM-assisted assessment can be implemented at a national scale, even in a small-language context, while maintaining human oversight and compliance with emerging educational and regulatory standards.

Tyler A. Chang, Catherine Arnett, Abdelrahman Eldesokey et al. · uw

To date, there exist almost no culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) that cover a large number of languages and cultures. In this paper, we present Global PIQA, a participatory commonsense reasoning benchmark for over 100 languages, constructed by hand by 335 researchers from 65 countries around the world. The 116 language varieties in Global PIQA cover five continents, 14 language families, and 23 writing systems. In the non-parallel split of Global PIQA, over 50% of examples reference local foods, customs, traditions, or other culturally-specific elements. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs perform well on Global PIQA in aggregate, but they exhibit weaker performance in lower-resource languages (up to a 37% accuracy gap, despite random chance at 50%). Open models generally perform worse than proprietary models. Global PIQA highlights that in many languages and cultures, everyday knowledge remains an area for improvement, alongside more widely-discussed capabilities such as complex reasoning and expert knowledge. Beyond its uses for LLM evaluation, we hope that Global PIQA provides a glimpse into the wide diversity of cultures in which human language is embedded.