Llama-3.1-Sherkala-8B-Chat: An Open Large Language Model for Kazakh

Llama-3.1-Sherkala-8B-Chat, or Sherkala-Chat (8B) for short, is a state-of-the-art instruction-tuned open generative large language model (LLM) designed for Kazakh. Sherkala-Chat (8B) aims to enhance the inclusivity of LLM advancements for Kazakh speakers. Adapted from the LLaMA-3.1-8B model, Sherkala-Chat (8B) is trained on 45.3B tokens across Kazakh, English, Russian, and Turkish. With 8 billion parameters, it demonstrates strong knowledge and reasoning abilities in Kazakh, significantly outperforming existing open Kazakh and multilingual models of similar scale while achieving competitive performance in English. We release Sherkala-Chat (8B) as an open-weight instruction-tuned model and provide a detailed overview of its training, fine-tuning, safety alignment, and evaluation, aiming to advance research and support diverse real-world applications.

KazMMLU: Evaluating Language Models on Kazakh, Russian, and Regional Knowledge of Kazakhstan

Despite having a population of twenty million, Kazakhstan's culture and language remain underrepresented in the field of natural language processing. Although large language models (LLMs) continue to advance worldwide, progress in Kazakh language has been limited, as seen in the scarcity of dedicated models and benchmark evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce KazMMLU, the first MMLU-style dataset specifically designed for Kazakh language. KazMMLU comprises 23,000 questions that cover various educational levels, including STEM, humanities, and social sciences, sourced from authentic educational materials and manually validated by native speakers and educators. The dataset includes 10,969 Kazakh questions and 12,031 Russian questions, reflecting Kazakhstan's bilingual education system and rich local context. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art multilingual models (Llama-3.1, Qwen-2.5, GPT-4, and DeepSeek V3) demonstrates substantial room for improvement, as even the best-performing models struggle to achieve competitive performance in Kazakh and Russian. These findings underscore significant performance gaps compared to high-resource languages. We hope that our dataset will enable further research and development of Kazakh-centric LLMs. Data and code will be made available upon acceptance.

What Makes Cryptic Crosswords Challenging for LLMs?

Cryptic crosswords are puzzles that rely on general knowledge and the solver's ability to manipulate language on different levels, dealing with various types of wordplay. Previous research suggests that solving such puzzles is challenging even for modern NLP models, including Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there is little to no research on the reasons for their poor performance on this task. In this paper, we establish the benchmark results for three popular LLMs: Gemma2, LLaMA3 and ChatGPT, showing that their performance on this task is still significantly below that of humans. We also investigate why these models struggle to achieve superior performance. We release our code and introduced datasets at https://github.com/bodasadallah/decrypting-crosswords.

Unifying AI Tutor Evaluation: An Evaluation Taxonomy for Pedagogical Ability Assessment of LLM-Powered AI Tutors

In this paper, we investigate whether current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are effective as AI tutors and whether they demonstrate pedagogical abilities necessary for good AI tutoring in educational dialogues. Previous efforts towards evaluation have been limited to subjective protocols and benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified evaluation taxonomy with eight pedagogical dimensions based on key learning sciences principles, which is designed to assess the pedagogical value of LLM-powered AI tutor responses grounded in student mistakes or confusion in the mathematical domain. We release MRBench -- a new evaluation benchmark containing 192 conversations and 1,596 responses from seven state-of-the-art LLM-based and human tutors, providing gold annotations for eight pedagogical dimensions. We assess reliability of the popular Prometheus2 LLM as an evaluator and analyze each tutor's pedagogical abilities, highlighting which LLMs are good tutors and which ones are more suitable as question-answering systems. We believe that the presented taxonomy, benchmark, and human-annotated labels will streamline the evaluation process and help track the progress in AI tutors' development.

LLMs in Education: Novel Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities

The role of large language models (LLMs) in education is an increasing area of interest today, considering the new opportunities they offer for teaching, learning, and assessment. This cutting-edge tutorial provides an overview of the educational applications of NLP and the impact that the recent advances in LLMs have had on this field. We will discuss the key challenges and opportunities presented by LLMs, grounding them in the context of four major educational applications: reading, writing, and speaking skills, and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). This COLING 2025 tutorial is designed for researchers and practitioners interested in the educational applications of NLP and the role LLMs have to play in this area. It is the first of its kind to address this timely topic.

SelectLLM: Query-Aware Efficient Selection Algorithm for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have gained increased popularity due to their remarkable success across various tasks, which has led to the active development of a large set of diverse LLMs. However, individual LLMs have limitations when applied to complex tasks because of such factors as training biases, model sizes, and the datasets used. A promising approach is to efficiently harness the diverse capabilities of LLMs to overcome these individual limitations. Towards this goal, we introduce a novel LLM selection algorithm called SelectLLM. This algorithm directs input queries to the most suitable subset of LLMs from a large pool, ensuring they collectively provide the correct response efficiently. SelectLLM uses a multi-label classifier, utilizing the classifier's predictions and confidence scores to design optimal policies for selecting an optimal, query-aware, and lightweight subset of LLMs. Our findings show that the proposed model outperforms individual LLMs and achieves competitive performance compared to similarly sized, computationally expensive top-performing LLM subsets. Specifically, with a similarly sized top-performing LLM subset, we achieve a significant reduction in latency on two standard reasoning benchmarks: 13% lower latency for GSM8K and 70% lower latency for MMLU. Additionally, we conduct comprehensive analyses and ablation studies, which validate the robustness of the proposed model.

Harnessing the Power of Multiple Minds: Lessons Learned from LLM Routing

With the rapid development of LLMs, it is natural to ask how to harness their capabilities efficiently. In this paper, we explore whether it is feasible to direct each input query to a single most suitable LLM. To this end, we propose LLM routing for challenging reasoning tasks. Our extensive experiments suggest that such routing shows promise but is not feasible in all scenarios, so more robust approaches should be investigated to fill this gap.

PetKaz at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Can Linguistics Capture the Specifics of LLM-generated Text?

In this paper, we present our submission to the SemEval-2024 Task 8 "Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection", focusing on the detection of machine-generated texts (MGTs) in English. Specifically, our approach relies on combining embeddings from the RoBERTa-base with diversity features and uses a resampled training set. We score 12th from 124 in the ranking for Subtask A (monolingual track), and our results show that our approach is generalizable across unseen models and domains, achieving an accuracy of 0.91.

PetKaz at SemEval-2024 Task 3: Advancing Emotion Classification with an LLM for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations

In this paper, we present our submission to the SemEval-2023 Task~3 "The Competition of Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations", focusing on extracting emotion-cause pairs from dialogs. Specifically, our approach relies on combining fine-tuned GPT-3.5 for emotion classification and a BiLSTM-based neural network to detect causes. We score 2nd in the ranking for Subtask 1, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach through one of the highest weighted-average proportional F1 scores recorded at 0.264.

What Makes Math Word Problems Challenging for LLMs?

This paper investigates the question of what makes math word problems (MWPs) in English challenging for large language models (LLMs). We conduct an in-depth analysis of the key linguistic and mathematical characteristics of MWPs. In addition, we train feature-based classifiers to better understand the impact of each feature on the overall difficulty of MWPs for prominent LLMs and investigate whether this helps predict how well LLMs fare against specific categories of MWPs.