Targeted Lexical Injection for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Low-Resource African Languages

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their performance in low-resource languages (LRLs), such as Swahili, often lags due to data scarcity and underrepresentation in pre-training. A key challenge is achieving robust cross-lingual lexical alignment, crucial for tasks like translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. This paper introduces Targeted Lexical Injection (TLI), a novel and efficient fine-tuning approach. We first demonstrate that Lugha-Llama-8B-wura, a Swahili-centric LLM, exhibits strong, near-perfect lexical alignment for Swahili-English Research goal: Does targeted lexical injection enhance zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance on low-resource African languages in the FLORES-200 benchmark? Autonomous synthesis report generated by SOVEREIGN Research Kernel. Tribunal consensus score: 7.7/10. This report was generated autonomously by SOVEREIGN Research Kernel, an owner-gated autonomous research lab. The content synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed papers. Tribunal score: 7.7/10.