This paper presents the JGU Mainz submission to the WMT25 Shared Task on LLMs with Limited Resources for Slavic Languages: Machine Translation and Question Answering, focusing on Ukrainian, Upper Sorbian, and Lower Sorbian. For each language, we jointly fine-tune a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct model for both tasks with parameter-efficient finetuning. Our pipeline integrates additional translation and multiple-choice question answering (QA) data. For Ukrainian QA, we further use retrieval-augmented generation. We also apply ensembling for QA in Upper and Lower Sorbian. Experiments show that our models outperform the baseline on both tasks.

Question Answering (QA) systems are increasingly deployed in applications where they support real-world decisions. However, state-of-the-art models rely on deep neural networks, which are difficult to interpret by humans. Inherently interpretable models or post hoc explainability methods can help users to comprehend how a model arrives at its prediction and, if successful, increase their trust in the system. Furthermore, researchers can leverage these insights to develop new methods that are more accurate and less biased. In this paper, we introduce SQuARE v2, the new version of SQuARE, to provide an explainability infrastructure for comparing models based on methods such as saliency maps and graph-based explanations. While saliency maps are useful to inspect the importance of each input token for the model’s prediction, graph-based explanations from external Knowledge Graphs enable the users to verify the reasoning behind the model prediction. In addition, we provide multiple adversarial attacks to compare the robustness of QA models. With these explainability methods and adversarial attacks, we aim to ease the research on trustworthy QA models. SQuARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de.

Pre-trained multilingual language models are the foundation of many NLP approaches, including cross-lingual transfer solutions. However, languages with small available monolingual corpora are often not well-supported by these models leading to poor performance. We propose an unsupervised approach to improve the cross-lingual representations of low-resource languages by bootstrapping word translation pairs from monolingual corpora and using them to improve language alignment in pre-trained language models. We perform experiments on nine languages, using contextual word retrieval and zero-shot named entity recognition to measure both intrinsic cross-lingual word representation quality and downstream task performance, showing improvements on both tasks. Our results show that it is possible to improve pre-trained multilingual language models by relying only on non-parallel resources.

Contextualized word embeddings have emerged as the most important tool for performing NLP tasks in a large variety of languages. In order to improve the cross- lingual representation and transfer learning quality, contextualized embedding alignment techniques, such as mapping and model fine-tuning, are employed. Existing techniques however are time-, data- and computational resource-intensive. In this paper we analyze these techniques by utilizing three tasks: bilingual lexicon induction (BLI), word retrieval and cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI) for a high resource (German-English) and a low resource (Bengali-English) language pair. In contrast to previous works which focus only on a few popular models, we compare five multilingual and seven monolingual language models and investigate the effect of various aspects on their performance, such as vocabulary size, number of languages used for training and number of parameters. Additionally, we propose a parameter-, data- and runtime-efficient technique which can be trained with 10% of the data, less than 10% of the time and have less than 5% of the trainable parameters compared to model fine-tuning. We show that our proposed method is competitive with resource heavy models, even outperforming them in some cases, even though it relies on less resource