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Dec 8

Komodo: A Linguistic Expedition into Indonesia's Regional Languages

The recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have mostly focused on languages with easily available and sufficient resources, such as English. However, there remains a significant gap for languages that lack sufficient linguistic resources in the public domain. Our work introduces Komodo-7B, 7-billion-parameter Large Language Models designed to address this gap by seamlessly operating across Indonesian, English, and 11 regional languages in Indonesia. Komodo-7B is a family of LLMs that consist of Komodo-7B-Base and Komodo-7B-Instruct. Komodo-7B-Instruct stands out by achieving state-of-the-art performance in various tasks and languages, outperforming the benchmarks set by OpenAI's GPT-3.5, Cohere's Aya-101, Llama-2-Chat-13B, Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1, Gemma-7B-it , and many more. This model not only demonstrates superior performance in both language-specific and overall assessments but also highlights its capability to excel in linguistic diversity. Our commitment to advancing language models extends beyond well-resourced languages, aiming to bridge the gap for those with limited linguistic assets. Additionally, Komodo-7B-Instruct's better cross-language understanding contributes to addressing educational disparities in Indonesia, offering direct translations from English to 11 regional languages, a significant improvement compared to existing language translation services. Komodo-7B represents a crucial step towards inclusivity and effectiveness in language models, providing to the linguistic needs of diverse communities.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 14, 2024

Speech Analysis of Language Varieties in Italy

Italy exhibits rich linguistic diversity across its territory due to the distinct regional languages spoken in different areas. Recent advances in self-supervised learning provide new opportunities to analyze Italy's linguistic varieties using speech data alone. This includes the potential to leverage representations learned from large amounts of data to better examine nuances between closely related linguistic varieties. In this study, we focus on automatically identifying the geographic region of origin of speech samples drawn from Italy's diverse language varieties. We leverage self-supervised learning models to tackle this task and analyze differences and similarities between Italy's regional languages. In doing so, we also seek to uncover new insights into the relationships among these diverse yet closely related varieties, which may help linguists understand their interconnected evolution and regional development over time and space. To improve the discriminative ability of learned representations, we evaluate several supervised contrastive learning objectives, both as pre-training steps and additional fine-tuning objectives. Experimental evidence shows that pre-trained self-supervised models can effectively identify regions from speech recording. Additionally, incorporating contrastive objectives during fine-tuning improves classification accuracy and yields embeddings that distinctly separate regional varieties, demonstrating the value of combining self-supervised pre-training and contrastive learning for this task.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 22, 2024

IndicTrans2: Towards High-Quality and Accessible Machine Translation Models for all 22 Scheduled Indian Languages

India has a rich linguistic landscape with languages from 4 major language families spoken by over a billion people. 22 of these languages are listed in the Constitution of India (referred to as scheduled languages) are the focus of this work. Given the linguistic diversity, high-quality and accessible Machine Translation (MT) systems are essential in a country like India. Prior to this work, there was (i) no parallel training data spanning all the 22 languages, (ii) no robust benchmarks covering all these languages and containing content relevant to India, and (iii) no existing translation models which support all the 22 scheduled languages of India. In this work, we aim to address this gap by focusing on the missing pieces required for enabling wide, easy, and open access to good machine translation systems for all 22 scheduled Indian languages. We identify four key areas of improvement: curating and creating larger training datasets, creating diverse and high-quality benchmarks, training multilingual models, and releasing models with open access. Our first contribution is the release of the Bharat Parallel Corpus Collection (BPCC), the largest publicly available parallel corpora for Indic languages. BPCC contains a total of 230M bitext pairs, of which a total of 126M were newly added, including 644K manually translated sentence pairs created as part of this work. Our second contribution is the release of the first n-way parallel benchmark covering all 22 Indian languages, featuring diverse domains, Indian-origin content, and source-original test sets. Next, we present IndicTrans2, the first model to support all 22 languages, surpassing existing models on multiple existing and new benchmarks created as a part of this work. Lastly, to promote accessibility and collaboration, we release our models and associated data with permissive licenses at https://github.com/ai4bharat/IndicTrans2.

  • 15 authors
·
May 25, 2023

SeaLLMs 3: Open Foundation and Chat Multilingual Large Language Models for Southeast Asian Languages

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities across various tasks, yet their development has predominantly centered on high-resource languages like English and Chinese, leaving low-resource languages underserved. To address this disparity, we present SeaLLMs 3, the latest iteration of the SeaLLMs model family, tailored for Southeast Asian languages. This region, characterized by its rich linguistic diversity, has lacked adequate language technology support. SeaLLMs 3 aims to bridge this gap by covering a comprehensive range of languages spoken in this region, including English, Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Malay, Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Tamil, and Javanese. Leveraging efficient language enhancement techniques and a specially constructed instruction tuning dataset, SeaLLMs 3 significantly reduces training costs while maintaining high performance and versatility. Our model excels in tasks such as world knowledge, mathematical reasoning, translation, and instruction following, achieving state-of-the-art performance among similarly sized models. Additionally, we prioritized safety and reliability by addressing both general and culture-specific considerations and incorporated mechanisms to reduce hallucinations. This work underscores the importance of inclusive AI, showing that advanced LLM capabilities can benefit underserved linguistic and cultural communities.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 28, 2024 6

The Open Source Advantage in Large Language Models (LLMs)

Large language models (LLMs) mark a key shift in natural language processing (NLP), having advanced text generation, translation, and domain-specific reasoning. Closed-source models like GPT-4, powered by proprietary datasets and extensive computational resources, lead with state-of-the-art performance today. However, they face criticism for their "black box" nature and for limiting accessibility in a manner that hinders reproducibility and equitable AI development. By contrast, open-source initiatives like LLaMA and BLOOM prioritize democratization through community-driven development and computational efficiency. These models have significantly reduced performance gaps, particularly in linguistic diversity and domain-specific applications, while providing accessible tools for global researchers and developers. Notably, both paradigms rely on foundational architectural innovations, such as the Transformer framework by Vaswani et al. (2017). Closed-source models excel by scaling effectively, while open-source models adapt to real-world applications in underrepresented languages and domains. Techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and instruction-tuning datasets enable open-source models to achieve competitive results despite limited resources. To be sure, the tension between closed-source and open-source approaches underscores a broader debate on transparency versus proprietary control in AI. Ethical considerations further highlight this divide. Closed-source systems restrict external scrutiny, while open-source models promote reproducibility and collaboration but lack standardized auditing documentation frameworks to mitigate biases. Hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of both paradigms are likely to shape the future of LLM innovation, ensuring accessibility, competitive technical performance, and ethical deployment.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024 2

IberBench: LLM Evaluation on Iberian Languages

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain difficult to evaluate comprehensively, particularly for languages other than English, where high-quality data is often limited. Existing benchmarks and leaderboards are predominantly English-centric, with only a few addressing other languages. These benchmarks fall short in several key areas: they overlook the diversity of language varieties, prioritize fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities over tasks of industrial relevance, and are static. With these aspects in mind, we present IberBench, a comprehensive and extensible benchmark designed to assess LLM performance on both fundamental and industry-relevant NLP tasks, in languages spoken across the Iberian Peninsula and Ibero-America. IberBench integrates 101 datasets from evaluation campaigns and recent benchmarks, covering 22 task categories such as sentiment and emotion analysis, toxicity detection, and summarization. The benchmark addresses key limitations in current evaluation practices, such as the lack of linguistic diversity and static evaluation setups by enabling continual updates and community-driven model and dataset submissions moderated by a committee of experts. We evaluate 23 LLMs ranging from 100 million to 14 billion parameters and provide empirical insights into their strengths and limitations. Our findings indicate that (i) LLMs perform worse on industry-relevant tasks than in fundamental ones, (ii) performance is on average lower for Galician and Basque, (iii) some tasks show results close to random, and (iv) in other tasks LLMs perform above random but below shared task systems. IberBench offers open-source implementations for the entire evaluation pipeline, including dataset normalization and hosting, incremental evaluation of LLMs, and a publicly accessible leaderboard.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 23 2

LLM-Based Evaluation of Low-Resource Machine Translation: A Reference-less Dialect Guided Approach with a Refined Sylheti-English Benchmark

Evaluating machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages poses a persistent challenge, primarily due to the limited availability of high quality reference translations. This issue is further exacerbated in languages with multiple dialects, where linguistic diversity and data scarcity hinder robust evaluation. Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising solution through reference-free evaluation techniques; however, their effectiveness diminishes in the absence of dialect-specific context and tailored guidance. In this work, we propose a comprehensive framework that enhances LLM-based MT evaluation using a dialect guided approach. We extend the ONUBAD dataset by incorporating Sylheti-English sentence pairs, corresponding machine translations, and Direct Assessment (DA) scores annotated by native speakers. To address the vocabulary gap, we augment the tokenizer vocabulary with dialect-specific terms. We further introduce a regression head to enable scalar score prediction and design a dialect-guided (DG) prompting strategy. Our evaluation across multiple LLMs shows that the proposed pipeline consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest gain of +0.1083 in Spearman correlation, along with improvements across other evaluation settings. The dataset and the code are available at https://github.com/180041123-Atiq/MTEonLowResourceLanguage.

  • 3 authors
·
May 18

Knowledge Distillation and Dataset Distillation of Large Language Models: Emerging Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions

The exponential growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to highlight the need for efficient strategies to meet ever-expanding computational and data demands. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of two complementary paradigms: Knowledge Distillation (KD) and Dataset Distillation (DD), both aimed at compressing LLMs while preserving their advanced reasoning capabilities and linguistic diversity. We first examine key methodologies in KD, such as task-specific alignment, rationale-based training, and multi-teacher frameworks, alongside DD techniques that synthesize compact, high-impact datasets through optimization-based gradient matching, latent space regularization, and generative synthesis. Building on these foundations, we explore how integrating KD and DD can produce more effective and scalable compression strategies. Together, these approaches address persistent challenges in model scalability, architectural heterogeneity, and the preservation of emergent LLM abilities. We further highlight applications across domains such as healthcare and education, where distillation enables efficient deployment without sacrificing performance. Despite substantial progress, open challenges remain in preserving emergent reasoning and linguistic diversity, enabling efficient adaptation to continually evolving teacher models and datasets, and establishing comprehensive evaluation protocols. By synthesizing methodological innovations, theoretical foundations, and practical insights, our survey charts a path toward sustainable, resource-efficient LLMs through the tighter integration of KD and DD principles.

  • 24 authors
·
Apr 20

ReLI: A Language-Agnostic Approach to Human-Robot Interaction

Adapting autonomous agents to industrial, domestic, and other daily tasks is currently gaining momentum. However, in the global or cross-lingual application contexts, ensuring effective interaction with the environment and executing unrestricted human task-specified instructions in diverse languages remains an unsolved problem. To address this challenge, we propose ReLI, a language-agnostic framework designed to enable autonomous agents to converse naturally, semantically reason about the environment, and to perform downstream tasks, regardless of the task instruction's linguistic origin. First, we ground large-scale pre-trained foundation models and transform them into language-to-action models that can directly provide common-sense reasoning and high-level robot control through natural, free-flow human-robot conversational interactions. Further, we perform cross-lingual grounding of the models to ensure that ReLI generalises across the global languages. To demonstrate the ReLI's robustness, we conducted extensive simulated and real-world experiments on various short- and long-horizon tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot spatial navigation, scene information retrieval, and query-oriented tasks. We benchmarked the performance on 140 languages involving over 70K multi-turn conversations. On average, ReLI achieved over 90%pm0.2 accuracy in cross-lingual instruction parsing and task execution success rates. These results demonstrate the ReLI's potential to enhance natural human-robot interaction in the real world while championing linguistic diversity. Demonstrations and resources will be publicly available at https://linusnep.github.io/ReLI/.

  • 4 authors
·
May 3

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, and it is often used to test the ability of vision-language models to understand and reason on knowledge present in both visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA models use datasets that are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are typically Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, although these datasets often extend their linguistic range via translation or some other approaches, they usually keep images the same, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we construct CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark, designed to cover a rich set of languages and cultures, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. As a result, CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 28 countries on four continents, covering 26 languages with 11 scripts, providing a total of 9k questions. We then benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark can serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural capability and bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts toward increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

  • 75 authors
·
Jun 9, 2024 1

ViMRHP: A Vietnamese Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction via Human-AI Collaborative Annotation

Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction (MRHP) is an essential task in recommender systems, particularly in E-commerce platforms. Determining the helpfulness of user-generated reviews enhances user experience and improves consumer decision-making. However, existing datasets focus predominantly on English and Indonesian, resulting in a lack of linguistic diversity, especially for low-resource languages such as Vietnamese. In this paper, we introduce ViMRHP (Vietnamese Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction), a large-scale benchmark dataset for MRHP task in Vietnamese. This dataset covers four domains, including 2K products with 46K reviews. Meanwhile, a large-scale dataset requires considerable time and cost. To optimize the annotation process, we leverage AI to assist annotators in constructing the ViMRHP dataset. With AI assistance, annotation time is reduced (90 to 120 seconds per task down to 20 to 40 seconds per task) while maintaining data quality and lowering overall costs by approximately 65%. However, AI-generated annotations still have limitations in complex annotation tasks, which we further examine through a detailed performance analysis. In our experiment on ViMRHP, we evaluate baseline models on human-verified and AI-generated annotations to assess their quality differences. The ViMRHP dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/trng28/ViMRHP

  • 4 authors
·
May 12 2

"When Data is Scarce, Prompt Smarter"... Approaches to Grammatical Error Correction in Low-Resource Settings

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is an important task in Natural Language Processing that aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical mistakes in text. While recent advances in transformer-based models and large annotated datasets have greatly improved GEC performance for high-resource languages such as English, the progress has not extended equally. For most Indic languages, GEC remains a challenging task due to limited resources, linguistic diversity and complex morphology. In this work, we explore prompting-based approaches using state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4.1, Gemini-2.5 and LLaMA-4, combined with few-shot strategy to adapt them to low-resource settings. We observe that even basic prompting strategies, such as zero-shot and few-shot approaches, enable these LLMs to substantially outperform fine-tuned Indic-language models like Sarvam-22B, thereby illustrating the exceptional multilingual generalization capabilities of contemporary LLMs for GEC. Our experiments show that carefully designed prompts and lightweight adaptation significantly enhance correction quality across multiple Indic languages. We achieved leading results in the shared task--ranking 1st in Tamil (GLEU: 91.57) and Hindi (GLEU: 85.69), 2nd in Telugu (GLEU: 85.22), 4th in Bangla (GLEU: 92.86), and 5th in Malayalam (GLEU: 92.97). These findings highlight the effectiveness of prompt-driven NLP techniques and underscore the potential of large-scale LLMs to bridge resource gaps in multilingual GEC.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 25

Parallel Corpora for Machine Translation in Low-resource Indic Languages: A Comprehensive Review

Parallel corpora play an important role in training machine translation (MT) models, particularly for low-resource languages where high-quality bilingual data is scarce. This review provides a comprehensive overview of available parallel corpora for Indic languages, which span diverse linguistic families, scripts, and regional variations. We categorize these corpora into text-to-text, code-switched, and various categories of multimodal datasets, highlighting their significance in the development of robust multilingual MT systems. Beyond resource enumeration, we critically examine the challenges faced in corpus creation, including linguistic diversity, script variation, data scarcity, and the prevalence of informal textual content.We also discuss and evaluate these corpora in various terms such as alignment quality and domain representativeness. Furthermore, we address open challenges such as data imbalance across Indic languages, the trade-off between quality and quantity, and the impact of noisy, informal, and dialectal data on MT performance. Finally, we outline future directions, including leveraging cross-lingual transfer learning, expanding multilingual datasets, and integrating multimodal resources to enhance translation quality. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first comprehensive review of parallel corpora specifically tailored for low-resource Indic languages in the context of machine translation.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 2

Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

Discord has evolved from a gaming-focused communication tool into a versatile platform supporting diverse online communities. Despite its large user base and active public servers, academic research on Discord remains limited due to data accessibility challenges. This paper introduces Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024), the most extensive Discord public server's data to date. The dataset comprises over 2.05 billion messages from 4.74 million users across 3,167 public servers, representing approximately 10% of servers listed in Discord's Discovery feature. Spanning from Discord's launch in 2015 to the end of 2024, it offers a robust temporal and thematic framework for analyzing decentralized moderation, community governance, information dissemination, and social dynamics. Data was collected through Discord's public API, adhering to ethical guidelines and privacy standards via anonymization techniques. Organized into structured JSON files, the dataset facilitates seamless integration with computational social science methodologies. Preliminary analyses reveal significant trends in user engagement, bot utilization, and linguistic diversity, with English predominating alongside substantial representations of Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Additionally, prevalent community themes such as social, art, music, and memes highlight Discord's expansion beyond its gaming origins.

  • 15 authors
·
Feb 1

Towards Systematic Monolingual NLP Surveys: GenA of Greek NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has traditionally been predominantly focused on English, driven by the availability of resources, the size of the research community, and market demands. Recently, there has been a noticeable shift towards multilingualism in NLP, recognizing the need for inclusivity and effectiveness across diverse languages and cultures. Monolingual surveys have the potential to complement the broader trend towards multilingualism in NLP by providing foundational insights and resources, necessary for effectively addressing the linguistic diversity of global communication. However, monolingual NLP surveys are extremely rare in the literature. This study introduces a generalizable methodology for creating systematic and comprehensive monolingual NLP surveys, aimed at optimizing the process of constructing such surveys and thoroughly addressing a language's NLP support. Our approach integrates a structured search protocol to avoid selection bias and ensure reproducibility, an NLP task taxonomy to organize the surveyed material coherently, and language resources (LRs) taxonomies to identify potential benchmarks and highlight opportunities for improving resource availability (e.g., through better maintenance or licensing). We apply this methodology to Greek NLP (2012-2023), providing a comprehensive overview of its current state and challenges. We discuss the progress of Greek NLP and outline the Greek LRs found, classified by availability and usability, assessing language support per NLP task. The presented systematic literature review of Greek NLP serves as an application of our method that showcases the benefits of monolingual NLP surveys more broadly. Similar applications could be considered for the myriads of languages whose progress in NLP lags behind that of well-supported languages.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 13, 2024

Detection of Somali-written Fake News and Toxic Messages on the Social Media Using Transformer-based Language Models

The fact that everyone with a social media account can create and share content, and the increasing public reliance on social media platforms as a news and information source bring about significant challenges such as misinformation, fake news, harmful content, etc. Although human content moderation may be useful to an extent and used by these platforms to flag posted materials, the use of AI models provides a more sustainable, scalable, and effective way to mitigate these harmful contents. However, low-resourced languages such as the Somali language face limitations in AI automation, including scarce annotated training datasets and lack of language models tailored to their unique linguistic characteristics. This paper presents part of our ongoing research work to bridge some of these gaps for the Somali language. In particular, we created two human-annotated social-media-sourced Somali datasets for two downstream applications, fake news \& toxicity classification, and developed a transformer-based monolingual Somali language model (named SomBERTa) -- the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. SomBERTa is then fine-tuned and evaluated on toxic content, fake news and news topic classification datasets. Comparative evaluation analysis of the proposed model against related multilingual models (e.g., AfriBERTa, AfroXLMR, etc) demonstrated that SomBERTa consistently outperformed these comparators in both fake news and toxic content classification tasks while achieving the best average accuracy (87.99%) across all tasks. This research contributes to Somali NLP by offering a foundational language model and a replicable framework for other low-resource languages, promoting digital and AI inclusivity and linguistic diversity.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 23

SwitchLingua: The First Large-Scale Multilingual and Multi-Ethnic Code-Switching Dataset

Code-switching (CS) is the alternating use of two or more languages within a conversation or utterance, often influenced by social context and speaker identity. This linguistic phenomenon poses challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, which are typically designed for a single language and struggle to handle multilingual inputs. The growing global demand for multilingual applications, including Code-Switching ASR (CSASR), Text-to-Speech (CSTTS), and Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR), highlights the inadequacy of existing monolingual datasets. Although some code-switching datasets exist, most are limited to bilingual mixing within homogeneous ethnic groups, leaving a critical need for a large-scale, diverse benchmark akin to ImageNet in computer vision. To bridge this gap, we introduce LinguaMaster, a multi-agent collaboration framework specifically designed for efficient and scalable multilingual data synthesis. Leveraging this framework, we curate SwitchLingua, the first large-scale multilingual and multi-ethnic code-switching dataset, including: (1) 420K CS textual samples across 12 languages, and (2) over 80 hours of audio recordings from 174 speakers representing 18 countries/regions and 63 racial/ethnic backgrounds, based on the textual data. This dataset captures rich linguistic and cultural diversity, offering a foundational resource for advancing multilingual and multicultural research. Furthermore, to address the issue that existing ASR evaluation metrics lack sensitivity to code-switching scenarios, we propose the Semantic-Aware Error Rate (SAER), a novel evaluation metric that incorporates semantic information, providing a more accurate and context-aware assessment of system performance.

  • 8 authors
·
May 30

Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet it remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research. This often results in artificial intelligence (AI) models that fail to capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing high-quality, culturally relevant data for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL aims to ensure better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages in VL research. Beyond crowdsourcing, our initiative goes one step further in the exploration of the automatic collection of culturally relevant images through crawling and image generation. First, we find that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing. Second, despite the substantial progress in generative vision models, synthetic images remain unreliable in accurately reflecting SEA cultures. The generated images often fail to reflect the nuanced traditions and cultural contexts of the region. Collectively, we gather 1.28M SEA culturally-relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. Through SEA-VL, we aim to bridge the representation gap in SEA, fostering the development of more inclusive AI systems that authentically represent diverse cultures across SEA.

  • 92 authors
·
Mar 10 4

NER4all or Context is All You Need: Using LLMs for low-effort, high-performance NER on historical texts. A humanities informed approach

Named entity recognition (NER) is a core task for historical research in automatically establishing all references to people, places, events and the like. Yet, do to the high linguistic and genre diversity of sources, only limited canonisation of spellings, the level of required historical domain knowledge, and the scarcity of annotated training data, established approaches to natural language processing (NLP) have been both extremely expensive and yielded only unsatisfactory results in terms of recall and precision. Our paper introduces a new approach. We demonstrate how readily-available, state-of-the-art LLMs significantly outperform two leading NLP frameworks, spaCy and flair, for NER in historical documents by seven to twentytwo percent higher F1-Scores. Our ablation study shows how providing historical context to the task and a bit of persona modelling that turns focus away from a purely linguistic approach are core to a successful prompting strategy. We also demonstrate that, contrary to our expectations, providing increasing numbers of examples in few-shot approaches does not improve recall or precision below a threshold of 16-shot. In consequence, our approach democratises access to NER for all historians by removing the barrier of scripting languages and computational skills required for established NLP tools and instead leveraging natural language prompts and consumer-grade tools and frontends.

DASpeech: Directed Acyclic Transformer for Fast and High-quality Speech-to-Speech Translation

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) translates speech from one language into another using a single model. However, due to the presence of linguistic and acoustic diversity, the target speech follows a complex multimodal distribution, posing challenges to achieving both high-quality translations and fast decoding speeds for S2ST models. In this paper, we propose DASpeech, a non-autoregressive direct S2ST model which realizes both fast and high-quality S2ST. To better capture the complex distribution of the target speech, DASpeech adopts the two-pass architecture to decompose the generation process into two steps, where a linguistic decoder first generates the target text, and an acoustic decoder then generates the target speech based on the hidden states of the linguistic decoder. Specifically, we use the decoder of DA-Transformer as the linguistic decoder, and use FastSpeech 2 as the acoustic decoder. DA-Transformer models translations with a directed acyclic graph (DAG). To consider all potential paths in the DAG during training, we calculate the expected hidden states for each target token via dynamic programming, and feed them into the acoustic decoder to predict the target mel-spectrogram. During inference, we select the most probable path and take hidden states on that path as input to the acoustic decoder. Experiments on the CVSS Fr-En benchmark demonstrate that DASpeech can achieve comparable or even better performance than the state-of-the-art S2ST model Translatotron 2, while preserving up to 18.53x speedup compared to the autoregressive baseline. Compared with the previous non-autoregressive S2ST model, DASpeech does not rely on knowledge distillation and iterative decoding, achieving significant improvements in both translation quality and decoding speed. Furthermore, DASpeech shows the ability to preserve the speaker's voice of the source speech during translation.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 11, 2023

Empirical evidence of Large Language Model's influence on human spoken communication

From the invention of writing and the printing press, to television and social media, human history is punctuated by major innovations in communication technology, which fundamentally altered how ideas spread and reshaped our culture. Recent chatbots powered by generative artificial intelligence constitute a novel medium that encodes cultural patterns in their neural representations and disseminates them in conversations with hundreds of millions of people. Understanding whether these patterns transmit into human language, and ultimately shape human culture, is a fundamental question. While fully quantifying the causal impact of a chatbot like ChatGPT on human culture is very challenging, lexicographic shift in human spoken communication may offer an early indicator of such broad phenomenon. Here, we apply econometric causal inference techniques to 740,249 hours of human discourse from 360,445 YouTube academic talks and 771,591 conversational podcast episodes across multiple disciplines. We detect a measurable and abrupt increase in the use of words preferentially generated by ChatGPT, such as delve, comprehend, boast, swift, and meticulous, after its release. These findings suggest a scenario where machines, originally trained on human data and subsequently exhibiting their own cultural traits, can, in turn, measurably reshape human culture. This marks the beginning of a closed cultural feedback loop in which cultural traits circulate bidirectionally between humans and machines. Our results motivate further research into the evolution of human-machine culture, and raise concerns over the erosion of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the risks of scalable manipulation.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024

Decoding the Diversity: A Review of the Indic AI Research Landscape

This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of large language model (LLM) research directions within Indic languages. Indic languages are those spoken in the Indian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan, among others. These languages have a rich cultural and linguistic heritage and are spoken by over 1.5 billion people worldwide. With the tremendous market potential and growing demand for natural language processing (NLP) based applications in diverse languages, generative applications for Indic languages pose unique challenges and opportunities for research. Our paper deep dives into the recent advancements in Indic generative modeling, contributing with a taxonomy of research directions, tabulating 84 recent publications. Research directions surveyed in this paper include LLM development, fine-tuning existing LLMs, development of corpora, benchmarking and evaluation, as well as publications around specific techniques, tools, and applications. We found that researchers across the publications emphasize the challenges associated with limited data availability, lack of standardization, and the peculiar linguistic complexities of Indic languages. This work aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in the field of NLP, particularly those focused on Indic languages, and contributes to the development of more accurate and efficient LLM applications for these languages.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024 1

Trans-EnV: A Framework for Evaluating the Linguistic Robustness of LLMs Against English Varieties

Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly evaluated on Standard American English (SAE), often overlooking the diversity of global English varieties. This narrow focus may raise fairness concerns as degraded performance on non-standard varieties can lead to unequal benefits for users worldwide. Therefore, it is critical to extensively evaluate the linguistic robustness of LLMs on multiple non-standard English varieties. We introduce Trans-EnV, a framework that automatically transforms SAE datasets into multiple English varieties to evaluate the linguistic robustness. Our framework combines (1) linguistics expert knowledge to curate variety-specific features and transformation guidelines from linguistic literature and corpora, and (2) LLM-based transformations to ensure both linguistic validity and scalability. Using Trans-EnV, we transform six benchmark datasets into 38 English varieties and evaluate seven state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results reveal significant performance disparities, with accuracy decreasing by up to 46.3% on non-standard varieties. These findings highlight the importance of comprehensive linguistic robustness evaluation across diverse English varieties. Each construction of Trans-EnV was validated through rigorous statistical testing and consultation with a researcher in the field of second language acquisition, ensuring its linguistic validity. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/jiyounglee-0523/TransEnV and https://huggingface.co/collections/jiyounglee0523/transenv-681eadb3c0c8cf363b363fb1.

  • 7 authors
·
May 27

Probing Natural Language Inference Models through Semantic Fragments

Do state-of-the-art models for language understanding already have, or can they easily learn, abilities such as boolean coordination, quantification, conditionals, comparatives, and monotonicity reasoning (i.e., reasoning about word substitutions in sentential contexts)? While such phenomena are involved in natural language inference (NLI) and go beyond basic linguistic understanding, it is unclear the extent to which they are captured in existing NLI benchmarks and effectively learned by models. To investigate this, we propose the use of semantic fragments---systematically generated datasets that each target a different semantic phenomenon---for probing, and efficiently improving, such capabilities of linguistic models. This approach to creating challenge datasets allows direct control over the semantic diversity and complexity of the targeted linguistic phenomena, and results in a more precise characterization of a model's linguistic behavior. Our experiments, using a library of 8 such semantic fragments, reveal two remarkable findings: (a) State-of-the-art models, including BERT, that are pre-trained on existing NLI benchmark datasets perform poorly on these new fragments, even though the phenomena probed here are central to the NLI task. (b) On the other hand, with only a few minutes of additional fine-tuning---with a carefully selected learning rate and a novel variation of "inoculation"---a BERT-based model can master all of these logic and monotonicity fragments while retaining its performance on established NLI benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
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Sep 16, 2019

SimVG: A Simple Framework for Visual Grounding with Decoupled Multi-modal Fusion

Visual grounding is a common vision task that involves grounding descriptive sentences to the corresponding regions of an image. Most existing methods use independent image-text encoding and apply complex hand-crafted modules or encoder-decoder architectures for modal interaction and query reasoning. However, their performance significantly drops when dealing with complex textual expressions. This is because the former paradigm only utilizes limited downstream data to fit the multi-modal feature fusion. Therefore, it is only effective when the textual expressions are relatively simple. In contrast, given the wide diversity of textual expressions and the uniqueness of downstream training data, the existing fusion module, which extracts multimodal content from a visual-linguistic context, has not been fully investigated. In this paper, we present a simple yet robust transformer-based framework, SimVG, for visual grounding. Specifically, we decouple visual-linguistic feature fusion from downstream tasks by leveraging existing multimodal pre-trained models and incorporating additional object tokens to facilitate deep integration of downstream and pre-training tasks. Furthermore, we design a dynamic weight-balance distillation method in the multi-branch synchronous learning process to enhance the representation capability of the simpler branch. This branch only consists of a lightweight MLP, which simplifies the structure and improves reasoning speed. Experiments on six widely used VG datasets, i.e., RefCOCO/+/g, ReferIt, Flickr30K, and GRefCOCO, demonstrate the superiority of SimVG. Finally, the proposed method not only achieves improvements in efficiency and convergence speed but also attains new state-of-the-art performance on these benchmarks. Codes and models will be available at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/SimVG.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

AI, write an essay for me: A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays

Background: Recently, ChatGPT and similar generative AI models have attracted hundreds of millions of users and become part of the public discourse. Many believe that such models will disrupt society and will result in a significant change in the education system and information generation in the future. So far, this belief is based on either colloquial evidence or benchmarks from the owners of the models -- both lack scientific rigour. Objective: Through a large-scale study comparing human-written versus ChatGPT-generated argumentative student essays, we systematically assess the quality of the AI-generated content. Methods: A large corpus of essays was rated using standard criteria by a large number of human experts (teachers). We augment the analysis with a consideration of the linguistic characteristics of the generated essays. Results: Our results demonstrate that ChatGPT generates essays that are rated higher for quality than human-written essays. The writing style of the AI models exhibits linguistic characteristics that are different from those of the human-written essays, e.g., it is characterized by fewer discourse and epistemic markers, but more nominalizations and greater lexical diversity. Conclusions: Our results clearly demonstrate that models like ChatGPT outperform humans in generating argumentative essays. Since the technology is readily available for anyone to use, educators must act immediately. We must re-invent homework and develop teaching concepts that utilize these AI models in the same way as math utilized the calculator: teach the general concepts first and then use AI tools to free up time for other learning objectives.

  • 5 authors
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Apr 24, 2023 1

Controllable Text Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated high text generation quality. However, in real-world applications, LLMs must meet increasingly complex requirements. Beyond avoiding misleading or inappropriate content, LLMs are also expected to cater to specific user needs, such as imitating particular writing styles or generating text with poetic richness. These varied demands have driven the development of Controllable Text Generation (CTG) techniques, which ensure that outputs adhere to predefined control conditions--such as safety, sentiment, thematic consistency, and linguistic style--while maintaining high standards of helpfulness, fluency, and diversity. This paper systematically reviews the latest advancements in CTG for LLMs, offering a comprehensive definition of its core concepts and clarifying the requirements for control conditions and text quality. We categorize CTG tasks into two primary types: content control and attribute control. The key methods are discussed, including model retraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, prompt engineering, latent space manipulation, and decoding-time intervention. We analyze each method's characteristics, advantages, and limitations, providing nuanced insights for achieving generation control. Additionally, we review CTG evaluation methods, summarize its applications across domains, and address key challenges in current research, including reduced fluency and practicality. We also propose several appeals, such as placing greater emphasis on real-world applications in future research. This paper aims to offer valuable guidance to researchers and developers in the field. Our reference list and Chinese version are open-sourced at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/CTGSurvey.

  • 11 authors
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Aug 22, 2024 2

Measuring Prosody Diversity in Zero-Shot TTS: A New Metric, Benchmark, and Exploration

Prosody diversity is essential for achieving naturalness and expressiveness in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS). However, frequently used acoustic metrics capture only partial views of prosodic variation and correlate poorly with human perception, leaving the problem of reliably quantifying prosody diversity underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProsodyEval, a prosody diversity assessment dataset that provides Prosody Mean Opinion Score (PMOS) alongside conventional acoustic metrics. ProsodyEval comprises 1000 speech samples derived from 7 mainstream TTS systems, with 2000 human ratings. Building on this, we propose the Discretized Speech Weighted Edit Distance (DS-WED), a new objective diversity metric that quantifies prosodic variation via weighted edit distance over semantic tokens. Experiments on ProsodyEval show that DS-WED achieves substantially higher correlation with human judgments than existing acoustic metrics, while remaining highly robust in speech tokenization from HuBERT and WavLM. Leveraging DS-WED, we benchmark state-of-the-art open-source TTS systems on LibriSpeech test-clean and Seed-TTS test-en, and further explorations uncover several factors that influence prosody diversity, including generative modeling paradigms, duration control, and reinforcement learning. Moreover, we find that current large audio language models (LALMs) remain limited in capturing prosodic variations. Audio samples are available at https://prosodyeval.github.io.

  • 8 authors
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Sep 24

Bridging Gaps in Hate Speech Detection: Meta-Collections and Benchmarks for Low-Resource Iberian Languages

Hate speech poses a serious threat to social cohesion and individual well-being, particularly on social media, where it spreads rapidly. While research on hate speech detection has progressed, it remains largely focused on English, resulting in limited resources and benchmarks for low-resource languages. Moreover, many of these languages have multiple linguistic varieties, a factor often overlooked in current approaches. At the same time, large language models require substantial amounts of data to perform reliably, a requirement that low-resource languages often cannot meet. In this work, we address these gaps by compiling a meta-collection of hate speech datasets for European Spanish, standardised with unified labels and metadata. This collection is based on a systematic analysis and integration of existing resources, aiming to bridge the data gap and support more consistent and scalable hate speech detection. We extended this collection by translating it into European Portuguese and into a Galician standard that is more convergent with Spanish and another Galician variant that is more convergent with Portuguese, creating aligned multilingual corpora. Using these resources, we establish new benchmarks for hate speech detection in Iberian languages. We evaluate state-of-the-art large language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, providing baseline results for future research. Moreover, we perform a cross-lingual analysis with our target languages. Our findings underscore the importance of multilingual and variety-aware approaches in hate speech detection and offer a foundation for improved benchmarking in underrepresented European languages.

  • 3 authors
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Oct 13

Prismatic Synthesis: Gradient-based Data Diversification Boosts Generalization in LLM Reasoning

Effective generalization in language models depends critically on the diversity of their training data. Yet existing diversity metrics often fall short of this goal, relying on surface-level heuristics that are decoupled from model behavior. This motivates us to ask: What kind of diversity in training data actually drives generalization in language models -- and how can we measure and amplify it? Through large-scale empirical analyses spanning over 300 training runs, carefully controlled for data scale and quality, we show that data diversity can be a strong predictor of generalization in LLM reasoning -- as measured by average model performance on unseen out-of-distribution benchmarks. We introduce G-Vendi, a metric that quantifies diversity via the entropy of model-induced gradients. Despite using a small off-the-shelf proxy model for gradients, G-Vendi consistently outperforms alternative measures, achieving strong correlation (Spearman's rho approx 0.9) with out-of-distribution (OOD) performance on both natural language inference (NLI) and math reasoning tasks. Building on this insight, we present Prismatic Synthesis, a framework for generating diverse synthetic data by targeting underrepresented regions in gradient space. Experimental results show that Prismatic Synthesis consistently improves model performance as we scale synthetic data -- not just on in-distribution test but across unseen, out-of-distribution benchmarks -- significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models that rely on 20 times larger data generator than ours. For example, PrismMath-7B, our model distilled from a 32B LLM, outperforms R1-Distill-Qwen-7B -- the same base model trained on proprietary data generated by 671B R1 -- on 6 out of 7 challenging benchmarks.

  • 10 authors
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May 26

QuaDMix: Quality-Diversity Balanced Data Selection for Efficient LLM Pretraining

Quality and diversity are two critical metrics for the training data of large language models (LLMs), positively impacting performance. Existing studies often optimize these metrics separately, typically by first applying quality filtering and then adjusting data proportions. However, these approaches overlook the inherent trade-off between quality and diversity, necessitating their joint consideration. Given a fixed training quota, it is essential to evaluate both the quality of each data point and its complementary effect on the overall dataset. In this paper, we introduce a unified data selection framework called QuaDMix, which automatically optimizes the data distribution for LLM pretraining while balancing both quality and diversity. Specifically, we first propose multiple criteria to measure data quality and employ domain classification to distinguish data points, thereby measuring overall diversity. QuaDMix then employs a unified parameterized data sampling function that determines the sampling probability of each data point based on these quality and diversity related labels. To accelerate the search for the optimal parameters involved in the QuaDMix framework, we conduct simulated experiments on smaller models and use LightGBM for parameters searching, inspired by the RegMix method. Our experiments across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that QuaDMix achieves an average performance improvement of 7.2% across multiple benchmarks. These results outperform the independent strategies for quality and diversity, highlighting the necessity and ability to balance data quality and diversity.

  • 10 authors
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Apr 23 2

Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback

In many text-generation problems, users may prefer not only a single response, but a diverse range of high-quality outputs from which to choose. Quality-diversity (QD) search algorithms aim at such outcomes, by continually improving and diversifying a population of candidates. However, the applicability of QD to qualitative domains, like creative writing, has been limited by the difficulty of algorithmically specifying measures of quality and diversity. Interestingly, recent developments in language models (LMs) have enabled guiding search through AI feedback, wherein LMs are prompted in natural language to evaluate qualitative aspects of text. Leveraging this development, we introduce Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback (QDAIF), wherein an evolutionary algorithm applies LMs to both generate variation and evaluate the quality and diversity of candidate text. When assessed on creative writing domains, QDAIF covers more of a specified search space with high-quality samples than do non-QD controls. Further, human evaluation of QDAIF-generated creative texts validates reasonable agreement between AI and human evaluation. Our results thus highlight the potential of AI feedback to guide open-ended search for creative and original solutions, providing a recipe that seemingly generalizes to many domains and modalities. In this way, QDAIF is a step towards AI systems that can independently search, diversify, evaluate, and improve, which are among the core skills underlying human society's capacity for innovation.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 19, 2023

Increasing Diversity While Maintaining Accuracy: Text Data Generation with Large Language Models and Human Interventions

Large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate text data for training and evaluating other models. However, creating high-quality datasets with LLMs can be challenging. In this work, we explore human-AI partnerships to facilitate high diversity and accuracy in LLM-based text data generation. We first examine two approaches to diversify text generation: 1) logit suppression, which minimizes the generation of languages that have already been frequently generated, and 2) temperature sampling, which flattens the token sampling probability. We found that diversification approaches can increase data diversity but often at the cost of data accuracy (i.e., text and labels being appropriate for the target domain). To address this issue, we examined two human interventions, 1) label replacement (LR), correcting misaligned labels, and 2) out-of-scope filtering (OOSF), removing instances that are out of the user's domain of interest or to which no considered label applies. With oracle studies, we found that LR increases the absolute accuracy of models trained with diversified datasets by 14.4%. Moreover, we found that some models trained with data generated with LR interventions outperformed LLM-based few-shot classification. In contrast, OOSF was not effective in increasing model accuracy, implying the need for future work in human-in-the-loop text data generation.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 7, 2023

GRADE: Quantifying Sample Diversity in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models are remarkable at generating realistic images based on textual descriptions. However, textual prompts are inherently underspecified: they do not specify all possible attributes of the required image. This raises two key questions: Do T2I models generate diverse outputs on underspecified prompts? How can we automatically measure diversity? We propose GRADE: Granular Attribute Diversity Evaluation, an automatic method for quantifying sample diversity. GRADE leverages the world knowledge embedded in large language models and visual question-answering systems to identify relevant concept-specific axes of diversity (e.g., ``shape'' and ``color'' for the concept ``cookie''). It then estimates frequency distributions of concepts and their attributes and quantifies diversity using (normalized) entropy. GRADE achieves over 90% human agreement while exhibiting weak correlation to commonly used diversity metrics. We use GRADE to measure the overall diversity of 12 T2I models using 400 concept-attribute pairs, revealing that all models display limited variation. Further, we find that these models often exhibit default behaviors, a phenomenon where the model consistently generates concepts with the same attributes (e.g., 98% of the cookies are round). Finally, we demonstrate that a key reason for low diversity is due to underspecified captions in training data. Our work proposes a modern, semantically-driven approach to measure sample diversity and highlights the stunning homogeneity in outputs by T2I models.

  • 5 authors
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Oct 29, 2024

Towards Better Inclusivity: A Diverse Tweet Corpus of English Varieties

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties was - and, in many cases, still is - used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private messages, social media sites like Twitter provide a platform for users to communicate informally in a scrapeable format. Notably, Indian English (Hinglish), Singaporean English (Singlish), and African-American English (AAE) can be commonly found online. These varieties pose a challenge to existing natural language processing (NLP) tools as they often differ orthographically and syntactically from standard English for which the majority of these tools are built. NLP models trained on standard English texts produced biased outcomes for users of underrepresented varieties. Some research has aimed to overcome the inherent biases caused by unrepresentative data through techniques like data augmentation or adjusting training models. We aim to address the issue of bias at its root - the data itself. We curate a dataset of tweets from countries with high proportions of underserved English variety speakers, and propose an annotation framework of six categorical classifications along a pseudo-spectrum that measures the degree of standard English and that thereby indirectly aims to surface the manifestations of English varieties in these tweets. Following best annotation practices, our growing corpus features 170,800 tweets taken from 7 countries, labeled by annotators who are from those countries and can communicate in regionally-dominant varieties of English. Our corpus highlights the accuracy discrepancies in pre-trained language identifiers between western English and non-western (i.e., less standard) English varieties. We hope to contribute to the growing literature identifying and reducing the implicit demographic discrepancies in NLP.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 21, 2024

A Massive Scale Semantic Similarity Dataset of Historical English

A diversity of tasks use language models trained on semantic similarity data. While there are a variety of datasets that capture semantic similarity, they are either constructed from modern web data or are relatively small datasets created in the past decade by human annotators. This study utilizes a novel source, newly digitized articles from off-copyright, local U.S. newspapers, to assemble a massive-scale semantic similarity dataset spanning 70 years from 1920 to 1989 and containing nearly 400M positive semantic similarity pairs. Historically, around half of articles in U.S. local newspapers came from newswires like the Associated Press. While local papers reproduced articles from the newswire, they wrote their own headlines, which form abstractive summaries of the associated articles. We associate articles and their headlines by exploiting document layouts and language understanding. We then use deep neural methods to detect which articles are from the same underlying source, in the presence of substantial noise and abridgement. The headlines of reproduced articles form positive semantic similarity pairs. The resulting publicly available HEADLINES dataset is significantly larger than most existing semantic similarity datasets and covers a much longer span of time. It will facilitate the application of contrastively trained semantic similarity models to a variety of tasks, including the study of semantic change across space and time.

  • 2 authors
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Jun 30, 2023