KinyaEmbed: Contrastive Sentence Embeddings for Kinyarwanda via Multi-Stage Curriculum Training

📅 2026-08-27
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为了解决基尼扬达语在现有嵌入模型中的不足,研究通过四阶段课程训练和多种负例排序损失方法构建了KinyaEmbed模型。
📝 Abstract
We present KinyaEmbed, the first dedicated sentence embedding model for Kinyarwanda, a morphologically rich Bantu language spoken by over 12 million people in Rwanda. Existing multilingual embedding models such as LaBSE, mE5-large, and OpenAI text-embedding-3-large perform poorly on Kinyarwanda due to severe under-representation in their pre-training corpora. KinyaEmbed is built on KinyaBERT-large and trained via a four-stage curriculum using MultipleNegativesRankingLoss (MNRL): Stage 1 leverages ~18,000 paraphrase pairs from the Official Gazette of Rwanda with three temperature scales; Stage 2 fine-tunes on 715 NLLB-translated MNLI triplets for entailment structure; Stage 3 aligns representations using English-Kinyarwanda OPUS-100 translation pairs; Stage 4 refines with 2,936 high-quality pairs filtered from KinyaCOMET at quality threshold 0.8. We evaluate on SemRel2024-rw and introduce Wiki-RW-STS, a new contamination-free Kinyarwanda STS benchmark of 300 pairs derived from Kinyarwanda Wikipedia. A seven-checkpoint ensemble (all5+23A*2, with the final stage double-weighted) achieves Spearman \r{ho}=0.7298 on SemRel2024-rw, surpassing mE5-large by 20.9% and OpenAI text-embedding-3-large by 41.0%. KinyaEmbed also achieves the best document clustering silhouette score (0.2146) across all evaluated models. All checkpoints, the KinyaCOMET filtered pairs, and the Wiki-RW-STS benchmark are publicly available.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Kinyarwanda
sentence embeddings
under-representation
multilingual models
pre-training corpora
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

KinyaEmbed
Multi-Stage Curriculum Training
MultipleNegativesRankingLoss
Kinyarwanda
Sentence Embeddings
I
Ireddi Rakshitha
Barclays
D
Devavarapu Yashwanth
Barclays
N
Ntakirutimana Pierre
Carnegie Mellon University