arXiv subjects

Toqeer Ehsan

Publications and source records attributed to Toqeer Ehsan.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Policy Documents to Structured Survey Responses: Evaluating Large Language Models for Policy Monitoring

Science, technology, and innovation policies are crucial for competitiveness, yet their diversity and scale make them difficult to map and monitor consistently. Existing approaches rely heavily on manual survey efforts, which are costly and challenging to scale across countries. Large language models (LLMs) enable new possibilities for extracting and structuring information from long and unstructured policy documents. This paper presents an application of LLMs as "AI respondents" for generating structured survey responses from policy texts. We develop a data extraction pipeline based on long-context in-context learning to map information from public web sources into predefined survey categories, including policy instruments, target groups, and thematic areas. The pipeline integrates a validation step using a secondary LLM to assess relevance and evidence, alongside comparisons with human-provided responses. Using a multi-country dataset, we evaluate the alignment between LLM-generated and human-generated outputs through overlap measures and cross-validation. Results show that LLMs achieve high agreement for structured indicators (84-95%), while differences remain in free-text fields, where models tend to provide more detailed procedural descriptions. These findings highlight the potential of hybrid human-AI workflows for policy monitoring, improving both efficiency and scalability while maintaining the need for human validation and contextual interpretation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Multi-Task Learning by using Contextualized Word Representations for Syntactic Parsing of a Morphologically Rich Language

We address the challenge of syntactic parsing for Urdu, a morphologically rich language, and present state-of-the-art results for both constituency and dependency parsing. This paper offers four major contributions: 1) the conversion of the CLE-UTB phrase structure treebank into a dependency treebank by developing language-specific head-word and phrase-to-dependency label mapping rules; 2) a novel sequence labeling scheme that transforms the parsing task into a unified representation; 3) the training of contextualized word representations on a large 220 million tokens Urdu corpus collected from the web; and 4) development of parsing framework using two learning paradigms, single-task and multi-task learning. Several post-processing rules are applied to improve the quality of the automatically converted dependency structure treebank. The proposed sequence labeling scheme enables the use of a shared architecture that learns the syntactic structures from both grammatical structures simultaneously and hence improves generalization. Experiments show that the multi-task learning setup significantly enhances parsing performance, achieving an F1 score of 91.39 for constituency parsing (an improvement of 3.29 points) and a labeled attachment score of 85.69 for dependency parsing (an improvement of 1.49 points). These results demonstrate that learning cross-task representations provides measurable benefits and advances the state of syntactic parsing for Urdu.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Vroom-Vroom at SHROOM-Visions: A Multi-Judge Committee for Detecting Hallucinated Spans in Vision-Language Outputs

This paper describes our submission to the SHROOM-Visions shared task on detecting and classifying hallucinated character spans in vision-language model outputs across four languages. We employ several fine-tuned vision-language models as independent annotators and combine their span predictions through character-level majority voting, and additionally explore activation probes. The approach ranks first in three of four languages and places on the podium in every language and metric. Our analysis indicates that disagreement among diverse models tracks disagreement among human annotators.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

A Scalable Framework for Automated NER Annotation Correction in Low-Resource Languages

Poor quality or noisy annotations in Named Entity Recognition (NER), as in any other NLP task, make it challenging to achieve state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we present a multi-step framework to enhance the annotation quality of NER datasets by employing automated techniques. We propose a frequency-based iterative approach that leverages self-training and a dual-threshold mechanism to enhance inference confidence. Experimental evaluations on different NER datasets demonstrate significant improvements in NER performance with respect to the original datasets. This work further explores the potential of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform NER for low-resource languages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation

Translating cultural content poses challenges for machine translation systems due to the differences in conceptualizations between cultures, where language alone may fail to convey sufficient context to capture region-specific meanings. In this work, we investigate whether images can act as cultural context in multimodal translation. We introduce CaMMT, a human-curated benchmark of over 5,800 triples of images along with parallel captions in English and regional languages. Using this dataset, we evaluate five Vision Language Models (VLMs) in text-only and text+image settings. Through automatic and human evaluations, we find that visual context generally improves translation quality, especially in handling Culturally-Specific Items (CSIs), disambiguation, and correct gender marking. By releasing CaMMT, our objective is to support broader efforts to build and evaluate multimodal translation systems that are better aligned with cultural nuance and regional variations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing NER Performance in Low-Resource Pakistani Languages using Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation

Named Entity Recognition (NER), a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), has shown significant advancements for high-resource languages. However, due to a lack of annotated datasets and limited representation in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), it remains understudied and challenging for low-resource languages. To address these challenges, we propose a data augmentation technique that generates culturally plausible sentences and experiments on four low-resource Pakistani languages; Urdu, Shahmukhi, Sindhi, and Pashto. By fine-tuning multilingual masked Large Language Models (LLMs), our approach demonstrates significant improvements in NER performance for Shahmukhi and Pashto. We further explore the capability of generative LLMs for NER and data augmentation using few-shot learning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, and it is often used to test the ability of vision-language models to understand and reason on knowledge present in both visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA models use datasets that are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are typically Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, although these datasets often extend their linguistic range via translation or some other approaches, they usually keep images the same, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we construct CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark, designed to cover a rich set of languages and cultures, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. As a result, CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 30 countries on four continents, covering 31 languages with 13 scripts, providing a total of 10k questions. We then benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark can serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural capability and bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts toward increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

cs.CV↗