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High-Order Question Generation in a Multilingual Educational Context
Authors:
Suna-Şeyma Uçar,
Itziar Aldabe,
Nora Aranberri,
Orphée De Clercq
Abstract:
Critical thinking is a fundamental skill that helps learners move beyond simple memorization. One way to develop this skill is through high-order questioning. However, crafting such questions remains a challenge for educators, and classroom practices tend to rely on low-order questions. Large Language Models have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating high-order questions, especially when…
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Critical thinking is a fundamental skill that helps learners move beyond simple memorization. One way to develop this skill is through high-order questioning. However, crafting such questions remains a challenge for educators, and classroom practices tend to rely on low-order questions. Large Language Models have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating high-order questions, especially when guided by prompts based on Bloom's Taxonomy. Yet, existing research has largely centered on this framework and focused only on English. This study addresses these gaps by introducing prompts grounded in two alternative frameworks: Claim-Evidence-Reasoning and Divergent Questioning within a multilingual context using Basque, Spanish, and English. Results indicate that while both an open-source and a proprietary model rather effectively generate questions in all three languages, only about half of the answerable questions are recognized by teachers as high-order. A positive finding is that the alternative frameworks produce structurally and conceptually varied questions, suggesting they could complement each other and provide viable alternatives to Bloom's Taxonomy.
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Submitted 15 July, 2026;
originally announced July 2026.
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Instructing Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Study for Basque
Authors:
Oscar Sainz,
Naiara Perez,
Julen Etxaniz,
Joseba Fernandez de Landa,
Itziar Aldabe,
Iker García-Ferrero,
Aimar Zabala,
Ekhi Azurmendi,
German Rigau,
Eneko Agirre,
Mikel Artetxe,
Aitor Soroa
Abstract:
Instructing language models with user intent requires large instruction datasets, which are only available for a limited set of languages. In this paper, we explore alternatives to conventional instruction adaptation pipelines in low-resource scenarios. We assume a realistic scenario for low-resource languages, where only the following are available: corpora in the target language, existing open-w…
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Instructing language models with user intent requires large instruction datasets, which are only available for a limited set of languages. In this paper, we explore alternatives to conventional instruction adaptation pipelines in low-resource scenarios. We assume a realistic scenario for low-resource languages, where only the following are available: corpora in the target language, existing open-weight multilingual base and instructed backbone LLMs, and synthetically generated instructions sampled from the instructed backbone. We present a comprehensive set of experiments for Basque that systematically study different combinations of these components evaluated on benchmarks and human preferences from 1,680 participants. Our conclusions show that target language corpora are essential, with synthetic instructions yielding robust models, and, most importantly, that using as backbone an instruction-tuned model outperforms using a base non-instructed model. Scaling up to Llama 3.1 Instruct 70B as backbone, our model comes near frontier models of much larger sizes for Basque, without using any Basque instructions. We release code, models, instruction datasets, and human preferences to support full reproducibility in future research on low-resource language adaptation. https://github.com/hitz-zentroa/latxa-instruct
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Submitted 13 March, 2026; v1 submitted 9 June, 2025;
originally announced June 2025.
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Latxa: An Open Language Model and Evaluation Suite for Basque
Authors:
Julen Etxaniz,
Oscar Sainz,
Naiara Perez,
Itziar Aldabe,
German Rigau,
Eneko Agirre,
Aitor Ormazabal,
Mikel Artetxe,
Aitor Soroa
Abstract:
We introduce Latxa, a family of large language models for Basque ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Latxa is based on Llama 2, which we continue pretraining on a new Basque corpus comprising 4.3M documents and 4.2B tokens. Addressing the scarcity of high-quality benchmarks for Basque, we further introduce 4 multiple choice evaluation datasets: EusProficiency, comprising 5,169 questions from…
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We introduce Latxa, a family of large language models for Basque ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Latxa is based on Llama 2, which we continue pretraining on a new Basque corpus comprising 4.3M documents and 4.2B tokens. Addressing the scarcity of high-quality benchmarks for Basque, we further introduce 4 multiple choice evaluation datasets: EusProficiency, comprising 5,169 questions from official language proficiency exams; EusReading, comprising 352 reading comprehension questions; EusTrivia, comprising 1,715 trivia questions from 5 knowledge areas; and EusExams, comprising 16,774 questions from public examinations. In our extensive evaluation, Latxa outperforms all previous open models we compare to by a large margin. In addition, it is competitive with GPT-4 Turbo in language proficiency and understanding, despite lagging behind in reading comprehension and knowledge-intensive tasks. Both the Latxa family of models, as well as our new pretraining corpora and evaluation datasets, are publicly available under open licenses. Our suite enables reproducible research on methods to build LLMs for low-resource languages.
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Submitted 20 September, 2024; v1 submitted 29 March, 2024;
originally announced March 2024.
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Does Corpus Quality Really Matter for Low-Resource Languages?
Authors:
Mikel Artetxe,
Itziar Aldabe,
Rodrigo Agerri,
Olatz Perez-de-Viñaspre,
Aitor Soroa
Abstract:
The vast majority of non-English corpora are derived from automatically filtered versions of CommonCrawl. While prior work has identified major issues on the quality of these datasets (Kreutzer et al., 2021), it is not clear how this impacts downstream performance. Taking representation learning in Basque as a case study, we explore tailored crawling (manually identifying and scraping websites wit…
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The vast majority of non-English corpora are derived from automatically filtered versions of CommonCrawl. While prior work has identified major issues on the quality of these datasets (Kreutzer et al., 2021), it is not clear how this impacts downstream performance. Taking representation learning in Basque as a case study, we explore tailored crawling (manually identifying and scraping websites with high-quality content) as an alternative to filtering CommonCrawl. Our new corpus, called EusCrawl, is similar in size to the Basque portion of popular multilingual corpora like CC100 and mC4, yet it has a much higher quality according to native annotators. For instance, 66% of documents are rated as high-quality for EusCrawl, in contrast with <33% for both mC4 and CC100. Nevertheless, we obtain similar results on downstream NLU tasks regardless of the corpus used for pre-training. Our work suggests that NLU performance in low-resource languages is not primarily constrained by the quality of the data, and other factors like corpus size and domain coverage can play a more important role.
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Submitted 26 October, 2022; v1 submitted 15 March, 2022;
originally announced March 2022.
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Multilingual and Cross-lingual Timeline Extraction
Authors:
Egoitz Laparra,
Rodrigo Agerri,
Itziar Aldabe,
German Rigau
Abstract:
In this paper we present an approach to extract ordered timelines of events, their participants, locations and times from a set of multilingual and cross-lingual data sources. Based on the assumption that event-related information can be recovered from different documents written in different languages, we extend the Cross-document Event Ordering task presented at SemEval 2015 by specifying two ne…
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In this paper we present an approach to extract ordered timelines of events, their participants, locations and times from a set of multilingual and cross-lingual data sources. Based on the assumption that event-related information can be recovered from different documents written in different languages, we extend the Cross-document Event Ordering task presented at SemEval 2015 by specifying two new tasks for, respectively, Multilingual and Cross-lingual Timeline Extraction. We then develop three deterministic algorithms for timeline extraction based on two main ideas. First, we address implicit temporal relations at document level since explicit time-anchors are too scarce to build a wide coverage timeline extraction system. Second, we leverage several multilingual resources to obtain a single, inter-operable, semantic representation of events across documents and across languages. The result is a highly competitive system that strongly outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Nonetheless, further analysis of the results reveals that linking the event mentions with their target entities and time-anchors remains a difficult challenge. The systems, resources and scorers are freely available to facilitate its use and guarantee the reproducibility of results.
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Submitted 2 February, 2017;
originally announced February 2017.
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Supervised Hierarchical Classification for Student Answer Scoring
Authors:
Itziar Aldabe,
Oier Lopez de Lacalle,
Iñigo Lopez-Gazpio,
Montse Maritxalar
Abstract:
This paper describes a hierarchical system that predicts one label at a time for automated student response analysis. For the task, we build a classification binary tree that delays more easily confused labels to later stages using hierarchical processes. In particular, the paper describes how the hierarchical classifier has been built and how the classification task has been broken down into bina…
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This paper describes a hierarchical system that predicts one label at a time for automated student response analysis. For the task, we build a classification binary tree that delays more easily confused labels to later stages using hierarchical processes. In particular, the paper describes how the hierarchical classifier has been built and how the classification task has been broken down into binary subtasks. It finally discusses the motivations and fundamentals of such an approach.
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Submitted 13 July, 2015;
originally announced July 2015.