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EACL 2026 Main Conference

March 29, 2026

Rabat, Morocco

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Low-resource languages (LRLs) often lack high-quality, large-scale datasets for training effective text embedding models, hindering their application in tasks like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and semantic search. In this work, we challenge the prevailing assumption that effective semantic alignment requires massive datasets or pristine, human-verified translations. Focusing on Armenian (an LRL with a unique script), we introduce a cost-effective adaptation strategy using small scale noisy synthetic data generated by translating English Reddit title-body pairs with open-weights models. We establish a comprehensive evaluation benchmark comprising existing datasets, translated data, and a manually curated dataset. Our experiments reveal a surprising "Less is More" phenomenon: fine-tuning a multilingual encoder (mE5) on just 10,000 noisy synthetic pairs yields 11-12\% average improvements across the benchmark with a 20\%+ relative improvement in retrieval performance, matching the performance of models trained on ~1 million examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate that neither increasing data scale, improving translation quality via state-of-the-art LLMs, nor diversifying data domains yields significant gains over this minimal baseline. We validate the generalizability of these findings on another LRL with a unique script. Our results suggest that semantic alignment for LRLs saturates early and is highly robust to noise, democratizing high-performance embedding creation for resource-constrained communities. We release the model, data, and the benchmark \href{https://metric-ai-lab.github.io/less-is-more-embeddings/}{at this https URL} to facilitate further research.

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Next from EACL 2026 Main Conference

Escaping the Probability Trap: Mitigating Semantic Drift in Cantonese-Mandarin Translation
workshop paper

Escaping the Probability Trap: Mitigating Semantic Drift in Cantonese-Mandarin Translation

EACL 2026 Main Conference

Fangqi Chen and 1 other author

29 March 2026

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