MameLoshnLM: Yiddish Language Model and Evaluation Benchmark

TL;DR - MameLoshnLM is the first open-source 8B-parameter LLM built specifically for Yiddish, released alongside a curated pretraining corpus (Oytser) and a multi-task benchmark (Kashes). It matters as a concrete template for building capable models in digitally underrepresented but textually rich languages where web-scale multilingual data fails.

• Model is obtained by continued pretraining of Llama 3.1 8B on Oytser, a corpus mixing contemporary web-native Yiddish with literary materials.
• Kashes is a multi-task benchmark covering translation, linguistic analysis, information extraction, and language understanding — addressing the lack of reliable Yiddish evaluation resources.
• MameLoshnLM outperforms open baselines of similar scale across benchmark tasks, and analyses show it better captures language-defining lexical and morphological patterns than general-purpose multilingual models.
• The authors argue existing multilingual corpora are poor Yiddish proxies due to noisy, machine-translated, and misclassified text — a failure mode they generalize to low-resource languages broadly.